Angie Parker, Executive Director of Middle Resolution PAC, noted, “The Lieutenant Governor race has been very competitive with a field of excellent candidates. We are pleased that Corey Stewart demonstrated a strong grasp of the constitutional principles of limited government and individual liberty during his questioning. Furthermore, Mr. Stewart has a well-organized and well-financed campaign.” Parker added, “Senator Mark Obenshain delivered an outstanding performance during his interview. This proven strength, combined with a vigorous statewide campaign, places Mark in a good position for both the May 18th nominating convention and November 5th general election.”

Over 200 Virginia Tea Party and Middle Resolution members from 31 groups across the state took part in the vetting session, each completing scorecards based on the candidates’ responses during live interviews. Identical questions on constitutional principles principles, policy, and political philosophy were asked of each candidate; candidates were not given questions beforehand. Campaign viability was also factored into the evaluation.

Participating Tea Party groups and Middle Resolution members will share the knowledge gained from the two-day vetting process with over 1,000 convention delegates from their respective groups. These delegates will then support Corey Stewart and Mark Obenshain for Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General, respectively, at the May 17-18th Republican Nominating Convention in Richmond where a multiple ballot process will lead to the selection of a Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor and a single ballot process will determine the Republican nominee for Attorney General.

The Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation is a coalition of 46 independent Tea Party and patriot groups that stand for fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free market principles.

Founded in Richmond, Virginia, Middle Resolution PAC helps elect leaders who are committed to restoring individual rights and limited government as described in the U.S. Constitution. Middle Resolution also holds legislators accountable once in office, following all necessary voting records.

Wytheville declines to endorse Crooked Road plans

Posted: Friday, February 15, 2013 4:06 pm

Millie Rothrock

After months of hearing about and discussing whether or not to endorse The Crooked Road’s plan to secure a National Heritage Area designation for the region, Wythe County supervisors came to a decision Tuesday.

Say you’re a 501c3 non-profit group with a clever name and cute logo. Convince
a few strategic folks—a congressman, a senator, and a press that might as well be
your own PR firm—to back you up. Then take 19 counties in SWVA, and draw a
boundary line around them. Hold 12 “public information meetings”, without mentioning any of this to the 19 elected county boards. Your own board of directors has some tourism folks and planning district commission figureheads across the region—names that pop up on board after board—so you’ve got “district-wide participation”. Get their network to write some letters of support. Take ‘em to your buddies in Congress. Then get everything inside the boundary line designated a National Heritage Area, fast-tracked through those hallowed halls as easy as one-two-three, with no debate.

Then, bingo! In the immortal words of Nancy Pelosi, we’ll find out what’s in the
bill after we pass it. Congratulations! You are now the unelected “managing entity” of almost 21% of the state. As long as you do things just like the National
Park Service says, the Secretary of the Interior will turn on a pipeline of federal
grant money that will keep all your special interest groups’ special interests welllubricated. Just like that. In the name of preserving the unique cultural heritage of a huge chunk of SWVA—how did it ever survive this long without you?— you are now the man.

Really? Is that all it takes for a noble, self-governing country with a proud history to be snookered out of its representative form of government, not to mention the US and Virginia Constitutions, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights? A 501c3 with a gleam in their eye? In this issue, we follow the money and find out.

After examining some NHAs that have been around for a while, we’ve determined that across the board, their management plans start out sounding like promoting the natural assets of the region— the art, music and food—is the answer to all of your economic prayers, we documented that a few years
down the road, the plans for the region start sounding a lot more like the UN’s
official policy on land.

“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable….” http://www.sovereignty.net/p/land/unproprts.htm

But since we’ve encountered a reluctance to believe such a plan could ever replace the authority of our local boards and planning commissions, we decided to document the victims.

What we found is shocking. And in case there is still denial of the connection to the global plan of action, Agenda 21—the “secret” that’s been around for 30 years— we prove that it’s no secret. UN Agenda 21 is Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development—no matter how sweet it is made to sound—is UN Agenda 21. And the management plan for The Crooked Road National Heritage Area is one and the same.

No one can dispute Southwest Virginia’s
uniquely rich musical heritage. We must continue efforts to leverage that distinction in a
way that brings tourists to our region and job
opportunities to our citizens. But after careful
consideration, I remain unconvinced that
designating The Crooked Road as a National
Heritage Area is in the best interest of my
constituents. Tourism success stories in
SWVA occur when risks are managed and
certainty surrounds the project and unfortunately, that cannot be said about the NHA designation at this time.Senator Bill Carrico

The Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage
Foundation does not support the National
Heritage Area Designation.Delegate Terry Kilgore, Chairman, Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Foundation

After much studying, I have decided that I will
not be supporting the proposed NHA designation for The Crooked Road. Too many questions persist and our proud music heritage is already being successfully marketed all across the country, and indeed the world. I
question whether the additional designation
will be worth the undertaking of risk.Delegate Israel O’Quinn

While the goals of The Crooked Road National Heritage Area may be noble in trying to promote Southwest Virginia musical heritage,
the Federal National Heritage designation
may put the rights of property owners at risk.
That is why I have not and will not support
the National Heritage Area designation.Delegate Nick Rush
Although I understand that the proposed National Heritage Area will
bring in new money, there are many concerns which remain unanswered.Delegate Anne B. Crockett-Stark

Delegate Joseph Yost and Delegate Will Morefield did not return our calls
or emails with a statement on the
NHA. However, Delegate Morefield has since gone on record opposing the NHA designation.

In 2012, the Smyth County Board of
Supervisors voted to defund The
Crooked Road Organization.
*************

Bart Dye’s bad fortune, along
with that of several other farmers
in his area of Shoals in southwestern Indiana, began in 1977, when,
as president of the Martin County
Farm Bureau, he organized the
farmers to oppose the expansion of
nearby Hoosier National Forest,
which was gobbling up farmland…………….
“Over 700 homes and businesses are currently within the
boundaries of the national lakeshore, despite the promise by the
federal government in 1965 that
there would be no condemnation of
homes and businesses,” said William Theis, a leader of STOP,
which he said has 310 members and
has collected 16,000 signatures on
a petition against dunes park expansion. “Literally hundreds of people
were forced to sell their homes
against their will and feel they were
not adequately compensated.”

The Park Service essentially told everyone they
could go on living their accustomed
“subsistence lifestyle,” as it was a
“cultural value” worthy of protection.
But the deep changes NPS brought
pulled the future out from under the
people, for their rights didn’t extend
to the next generation and their present lives now operated under an incomprehensible permit system

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground from Charlottesville to Gettysburg… is a sweet deal that could leave the Partnership “with a near monopoly on real estate development opportunities within the [JTHG] area………..

In the National Coal Heritage Area the people of
Hinton wanted funds to repair a local road. They lobbied their
legislators for several years, and finally the federal funding came
through. At that point, the National Park Service stepped in.
Because the local road was in a Heritage Area, Park Service
officials announced, the money would be used to create a Scenic
Parkway. The Scenic Parkwaycalled for condemning dozens of
properties, forcing people out of their homes.…..

Private landowners ostensibly selling their properties to the National Park Service are in fact not bona fide sellers but are giving up title to
escape the legal expenses of a
foredoomed condemnation.

A problem arises when Park
Service officials are using
their jargon term SELLER
outside their circle, understood by the public in the
generally accepted meaning of
a free agent conducting business. A clever Park promoter
even coined the slogan WILLING SELLER/WILLING
BUYER, falsely implying that
the two parties are on an
equal footing. This slogan has
developed into a mantra recited at hearings and discussions on Park expansion for
the deception of legislators
and the general public.
 It is reasonable to assume that
Park Service extortion was
exercised in most of the
1,130 title transactions.

At the bottom of this bowl of alphabet soup lies the origin of the push to put SWVA under the jurisdic-

tion of the National Park Service. The NHA brainstorm didn’t just start back in August of 2012, when a

few local newspapers discreetly announced some “public information meetings”. (There were twelve

meetings total, with about 30 attendees being the largest group.) The Crooked Road Heritage Music

Trail evolved from an Arts & Crafts Initiative launched in 2001 by Governor Warner that became

known as ‘Round the Mountain, SWVA’s Artisan Network. By 2006, Governor Kaine adopted

“Appalachia Forward”, a program that laid the foundation for getting funding through the Appalachian

Regional Commission, a federal-state-local partnership composed of the governors of the 13 Appala-

chian states and a federal co-chair.

In 2008, the VA legislature set up the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Commission. In 2010, they set up another non-profit, Friends of Southwest Virginia, to manage funds coming into each of the developing entities. The Commission then became a non-profit Foundation in 2011 and according to VACode §2.2-2734, the SWVACHF was established as a body politic and corporate. The purpose of the Foundation is to encourage the economic development of Southwest Virginia through the expansion of cultural and natural heritage ventures and initiatives related to tourism and other asset-based enterprises, including Heartwood: Southwest Virginia’s Artisan Center, The Crooked Road, ‘Round the Mountain, and other related cultural and natural heritage organizations and venues that promote entrepreneurial and employment opportunities.

When—and by whom—the decision was made to seek NHA status remains unclear. But in 2008, an

economic impact study of The Crooked Road was conducted by Sustainable Development Consulting

International, LLC, something that the National Park Service “encourages” in their NHA guidelines.

Only it’s not yo’ daddy’s sweat equity and all-American can-do spirit that will build this new rural economy for Southwest Virginia….it’s the Triple Bottom Line, the new-fangled business model that levels the playing field between filling a demand by producing a good product with equal parts social equity and environmental justice.

Oh…

and that includes equity between species, along with mitigating your carbon output. As the report confirms,

TBL was borne of UN Agenda 21 and what became known as Sustainable Development.

The report credits the Conservation Fund for their efforts in creating the TBL model “embedded

within the strategies” of ARC goals. A non-government organization (NGO) involved in promoting

government control of land use since the UN Habitat I Conference in 1976 and part of the EPA’s Smart

Growth Network, the Conservation Fund is an ARC grant recipient.

The Ford Foundation, a major contributor to ARC, funded the report. The Ford Foundation is also part

of the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. They are partnered with ICLEI

(International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives), the self-described implementation arm of

UN Agenda 21 and led the discussion on creating Sustainable Cities last June at the 20-year anniver-

The Crooked Road, ‘Round the Mountain and the other colorful-sounding spin-offs of our

new-fangled “asset based economy”—the Appalachian Regional Commission dubs it their ”creative cluster”— take their foundation in Sustainable Development/UN Agenda 21. How do we know this? From their own account.

RESPONSE TO ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO’S CHALLENGE: The Washington County Tea Party doesn’t need to make this stuff up, when the facts so clearly speak for themselves! We accept your challenge by reporting the truth.

What Sustainable Development Is and Is Not

Prepared by Anthony Flaccavento, January 23, 2011

Materials gathered by the Washington County Tea Party portray “sustainable development” as a sinister effort to undermine American values and install socialist policies that eliminate private property. Based on nearly 20 years of work, research and writing in this field, I am putting forth this challenge to their attack on sustainable development. It is divided into four sections, corresponding to four core elements of their “argument”.

Sustainable development is being driven by the United Nation’s Agenda 21

· Contrary to the WCTP’s contentions, “Agenda 21″ and the UN have absolutely nothing to do with the vast majority of sustainable development (SD) projects and initiatives in Washington county, neighboring states or the nation as a whole. Out of a dozen sustainable development initiatives in the Appalachian region and more than 30 nationwide with which I am personally familiar, not a single one was launched or driven by Agenda 21, or is managed or directed by it. In fact, all of these initiatives were started at the grassroots, by a broad base of community people including local businesses, farmers, civic leaders, elected officials, etc. In 20 years of work and consultation with SD groups around the nation, I have never once heard “Agenda 21″ even mentioned.

We suggest that you start here, Mr. Flaccavento, and get it right from the horse’s mouth—as some of us quaint folks say around here in Appalachia!

A recent study was completed of the Crooked Road portfolio of projects. Since ARC has provided funding for virtually all of the Crooked Road projects (mostly in tandem with
other Federal, state, or local funds) it provides a test of the value of using a more strategic
project funding that could be encouraged in other ARC states.

*******************************************

…..first-rate TBL uses relevant, common indicators to make it easier to
compare performance or “value added” across organizations and requires honest, open and
transparent disclosure. Ideally, it has been suggested that TBL should lead to improvements incorporate performance. TBL reports should include key goals for improving organizational
performance into the future – preferably quantitative and time-bound goals. The GlobalReporting Initiative, a program developed under the auspices of nearly 20 agencies including theWorld Business Council for Sustainable Development, the United National EnvironmentProgram and the World Resources Institute, standardizes TBL measures and areas to be reported
and currently has more than 1,300 participating organizations.

*************************************************

*************************************************

Here is another analysis of Sustainable Development and The Global Reporting Initiative………

I spent several hours navigating through the myriad of resources, data, and links. I am sure, most Americans do not have the interest or the time to research what is happening to their country.

GRI is encouraging organizations to report (read snitch) on Sustainable Development compliance in their countries.

The list of past supporters includes….The Ford Foundation.

“The Global Reporting Initiative and the United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development signed a Memorandum of Understanding
in 2008 to set internationally recognized sustainability reporting
standards. It was done to foster sustainable development in developing
countries and transition economies.”
The real ultimate goal is to spread the wealth and arrest development
in countries like U.S.

Should United Nations dictate to the rest of the world what economic justice is? I do not wish to receive lectures on respect for diversity from UN totalitarian governments that disrespect women, other religions, and repress minorities through genocide.
We had informants under the communist system—it allowed the
totalitarian government to better control the masses. We have whistleblowers
in capitalism; we do not need UN’s rules to control us
through organized snitching……I fail to see how a private corporation
is obligated to report anything to the United Nations.Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

Next Tea Party Meeting is Thursday, August 8, at 7 PM.

We are meeting at the Courtyard Marriott, 3169 Linden Drive, just off Interstate 81 Exit 7 in Bristol. The Virginia Civil Defense League will present a program on what they are doing to protect our Second Amendment rights. We will be planning our rallies for the Republican candidates for the state offices and our forum for candidates for the Washington County Board of Supervisors. Please come prepared to discuss problems in Washington County government. This is a very important meeting, so please plan to be there.

Directions:

From Interstate 81, take Exit 7, turn North (from I-81 South – turn right, from I-81 North – turn left), about 200 feet from the interstate, turn left on Linden Drive. The Courtyard Marriott will be about 1/4 mile on the left.

If this is the future of the New River Valley,

God help us. HUD, US DOT and EPA are coming to your town.

How? “Free” money. The $1 Million HUD grant, applied for by the New River Valley

Planning District Commission. Say goodbye to representative government and hello to “the

collective good”….courtesy of the HUD, EPA and DOT Trifecta.

Three thousand of these grants have been applied for all over the US. Three have been accepted in Virginia: Albermarle, Roanoke, and the New River Valley—Floyd, Giles, and Montgomery Counties don’t seem to have a clue about what they’ve gotten themselves into. Pulaski County–living up to its reputation for ineptitude–still hasn’t voted on joining the Livability Partnership Agreement, and now seem intent on dodging the vote. Their County Administrator signed off on the deal while at the overflow July 25th Board of Supervisors meeting, one supervisor for the second time confessed that he still couldn’t remember if they voted or not. Here’s a clue: YOU DIDN’T.

As for the rest of the NRV, we have not yet learned if Radford is clued in and on board. As for Blacksburg…

The Blacksburg City Council refused to hear a group of NRV property owners’

The August 11th “Livability Initiative Kick-Off Event” REPORT FROM THE FAR SIDE

Held at Claytor Lake State Park Conference Center, the event was totally controlled from the time of arrival. If you came with someone, you were separated and seating was assigned. A minimum of two facilitators at each table of 6-8 people. Each of the questions in the survey miraculously arrived with the “consensus” response, summarized here.

Question:What is your vision for the NRV in 20 years?

“My vision is having a clean river, local food, protecting our natural resources, affordable housing, more transportation choices, and a living wage for everyone. “

One of my friends was at a table with FOUR facilitators. At my table were a social worker from Pulaski, one from Floyd, a VT employee and another Blacksburg resident who is quoted exactly in the above response. What didn’t matter to these people—most of whom were imported from “Sustainable Blacksburg”—is the concept of our UNALIENABLE RIGHTS. I felt as though I were in the company of Eco-Zombies. OF THE GOVERNMENT, BY THE GOVERNMENT AND FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Government Grants: Our new economic world order. Devalue our rural property so we can’t afford to live on it. The EPA will decide whether or not we can have a septic tank, with a minimum price tag of $20,000 (legislation already in effect) and we’ll sell each other trinkets, grow all of our own food, and pledge our allegiance to the UN. The HUD-EPA-US DOT trifecta will make your local government as irrelevant as the US Congress is quickly becoming. We’ll be in our “Sustainability Hub” in the countryside. We’ll come to town to visit via mass transit in your Urban Development Area….

One of our people was verbally attacked and insulted by one of their “closers”, even though the first thing that everyone got was a lecture on the ground rules that included “respect differing opinions”. Spotting my supervisor at the Kick-Off Event, I asked him if they planned to vote at the August 22nd BoS meeting, since all they had was the County Administrator’s signature. “Well, we kinda just gave him our blessing…”

WELL, YOU’RE KINDA JUST NOT DOING YOUR JOB. REMEMBER, THE ONE THAT

INCLUDES SWEARING AN OATH TO UPHOLD AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION???

Another of the Pulaski supervisors in attendance responded that “It’s just a study….we’ll vote when the study is done….” REALLY? Then WHY are the Future Land Use maps already done? Have they bothered to check the 40 pages of “Mandated Outcomes” in the HUD Grant Description? Have they bothered to notice that HUD, the EPA and US DOT are partnered with ICLEI in peddling this grant to 3000 localities all over the country???
“Regional Government” will be the yoke around the necks of free people if this insanity is permitted to continue. Non-elected bureaucrats who control the 21 Planning District Commissions in the Commonwealth of Virginia are all members of the American Planning Association and the National Association of Regional Commissions. Both the APA and NARC are partnered with ICLEI, no doubt the inspiration for the radical transformation of the New River Valley. Inside the Trojan horse of Sustainable Development are the social justice, environmental justice and redistribution of wealth schemes that will rob us of our private property and unalienable rights, if permitted to do so.

Life in a green parallel universe

by Catherine Turner

“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several

times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the

smaller end.” Mildred sat across the hall from him. “What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s whatever you want it to be.”

Kevin Byrd, New River Valley Planning District Commission Executive Director

What did life used to be like?………

It’s all getting pretty fuzzy. I used to watch HGTV. I used to have a garden that grew more tomatoes and peppers than weeds. I used to bake focaccia almost every day. That was almost a year ago, before I started to need a chain on my reading glasses and a stronger prescription. That was before my introduction to Agenda 21.

Some people, when they first hear about it, think it sounds so sci-fi and over the top that you’re a nut job if you bring it up. That’s why they had to start calling it something else, like “Sustainable Development” or “Smart Growth”. What’s not to like about smart or sustainable? Agenda 21 sounded eerily interesting, sorta Ray Bradbury-esque. What I heard at a presentation one evening last fall set me back on my heels. How could I have missed something that’s been around for most of my life, one of the best kept secrets that’s nowhere close to being secret?

Before meeting the guy that I would marry and follow east from California’s Central Coast to

Pulaski, VA seven years ago,

I’d pretty much done most everything I’d dreamed about. Life was my oyster….make mine bbq’d over an oak fire with garlic, good bread and a great Sauvignon Blanc. I had survived a raucous childhood that started with 15 different grade schools and a lot of HUD housing. I’d gone back-to-the-land in the Sierra Nevada and become a cabinetmaker. Divorced and armed with a 2-year culinary degree I later became an executive chef at a respected Bay Area restaurant and then at Stanford University. Exhausted by all that, I went down the Coast to Monterey and instead of sweating over a hotline I started writing about it. For five years I wrote almost the entire food section of one of the most liberal alternative weeklies in the state. Then I wrote for the start-up Carmel Magazine. I was poor but I ate well and lived in a beautiful place.

I wrote stories about people who had come from all over the world to open their “own little place” where they would work hard and get their piece of the pie. The one of their choosing. I wrote a children’s book, The Adventures of Monterey Jack, that I hoped would spark

some interest in kids about cooking and eating good stuff.

Alice Waters, the God-mother of eating local even called it “charming” on the back cover.I marveled when I read Jack to a crowd of 100 kids in my husband’s West Virginia hometown. Those coalfield kids and I tasted some good cheese and in my mind anyway, got to see the Monterey Bay together.

I fell in love with Virginia, so much like the Tennessee of my itinerant youth. I had never paid much attention to politics. I got a rude introduction when my husband and I decided to pursue our dream of an equestrian development on Claytor Lake. I would have a real country store. He would build some homes on our 70 acres. Roanoke’s Hill Studio drew up the plans—a “green” project, with 80% open space—Gaye & Neel did all the engineering, and we thought everyone would love it as much as we did.

“Everyone” had other ideas. Our “neighbors” wanted us to put our property into a conservation easement. Passed by the Planning Commission, the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors declined our Special Use Permit. Our “neighbors” had convinced them that open space was the better part of valor. Not that they offered to pay the mortgage. Which we’re still paying.

Betcha didn’t know that………………………………….

The Conservation Reserve Program, established in 1986, has led to more than 30 million acres of land being taken out of crop production and put into permanent grass

and tree cover.

The San Joaquin Valley has for the last two years lain fallow. The state and feds turned the water off. 50,000 acres out of production. 40,000 jobs lost. We’re not clever enough to purportedly save a minnow and what was formerly known as America’s Bread Basket.

The Virginia Outdoors Foundation is partnered with the USDA (that’s right—-your tax dollars at work!) buying up millions of dollars of private property in the Commonwealth. Land owners get their cake and eat it, too. Who cares if the notion of “private” property is on the endangered list?

They used to grow food in Kansas...Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw.

I can see the day coming when even your home garden...Is gonna be against the law. Bob Dylan, Infidels, 1983

Oh yeah—we’d had another entrepreneurial fling in

the old downtown—a restaurant venture that didn’t

get off the ground, beyond months of demo on,

ironically enough, (keep reading) the old

Southwest Times building. The draconian fire

codes made my husband throw up his hands and

say “screw it”. Our $20,000 sprinkler system the

plans called for wasn’t enough to satisfy the fire

marshal and building department. The old architectural moldings we’d painstakingly exposed

would have to be covered up again. Feggedaboutit.

ICLEI (ICK-ley)…the United Nations spectre in your hometown

The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

They’re in 18 locales in Virginia, 600+ across the country, 1100 ‘round the world. They’re partnered with Roanoke and Blackburg.

Welcome to historic Abingdon, with the charming flavor of the old South. It’s a beautiful old town, with manicured lawns and imposing antebellum architecture.

Excuse me? ICLEI is here, too?

Sad, and true. The Mayor of Abingdon says that their only influence is about planting trees and recycling. his reply? When I reminded him of the Town’s commitment to lower the carbon footprint by 30%—using the ICLEI software—and that it’s an Article 1 §10 Constitutional no-no to buddy up with the UN, his reply?

“The courts can decide.”

Why should it matter?

Well, because there’s the little problem of unelected “advisors” that the voters never heard of (“ICK-ley? Who’s ICK-ley??”) getting a seat in your local government and from there getting their mitts on your Comprehensive Plan. And from there doing what’s been done to California’s Central Valley, and in South Carolina and is underway in every county in the country through benign-sounding, politically correct Sustainable Development.

What happened to the TRUTH?

The truth is in rare public display. So offended by Roanoke Times columnist Dan Casey’s bullying of the Roanoke Tea Party, I rang him up.

“Mr. Casey, have you ever looked at any of the United Nations websites on Agenda 21?”

Mr. Casey: “I read about it in Colorado’s Governor’s race.”

“Mr. Casey, have you ever looked at any of the United Nations websites on Agenda 21?”

Mr. Casey: “No.”

Only 3,640,000 Google hits in 0.17 seconds. Too much of an intellectual investment?

The New River Valley “Livability Initiative”

We still have property and a residence in the New River Valley. I’d like to sell it so my husband doesn’t have to work so hard. My last chef’s position paid almost $100K year in Pebble Beach. Right now my career pays less than when I started—about $10/hour, by the time you add ‘em all up. And real estate’s not moving in this quagmire.

But the New River Valley’s got a brand new plan. One not many NRV folks

have heard much about….

Cleverly dubbed “Rural Sustainability Hubs”, it’s a fetching idea cooked up by HUD, the EPA and US DOT. Coincidental to Obama’s Executive Order 13575, the White House Rural Council purports to exert broad municipal powers over the food, fiber, and energy production of Rural America. Our piece of this pie has a cheery blueprint for everything:

“Rural Sustainability Hubs” is the best way to accommodate future growth without losing unique identity while creating a new model for planning in a rural region. Using the concept of connected Sustainability Hubs as an organizing concept, the New River Valley Regional Sustainability Plan will integrate land use, housing, transportation, energy efficiency and conservation, natural resources, agriculture, food systems, arts and culture, and information technology throughout the region.

Doesn’t ring a bell? Well, Executive Director Kevin Byrd of the NRV Planning District Commission promises that they’ll get around to telling you about it. They’re gonna make their big public splash on Thursday, August 11th at Claytor Lake State Park. Too busy working, you say? Well, they’ve got lots of folks in their Consortium…Va Teach and non-profits and NGO’s (non-government organizations) that will be there in your place. And an Advisory Council, too….more non-profits and NGO’s.

(Gee, Kevin, you still haven’t called me since I asked you about being on that Council…)

The Floyd Planning Commission rolls out the draft of their new

Comprehensive Plan…

On July 18th, I attended the unveiling of the Comp Plan in Floyd. During my three minutes at the podium I asked the overflow crowd who’s ever heard of the NRVLivability Initiative? A few hands went up….mostly Floyd Tea Party folks. The Summary Overview states that citizens of Floyd are concerned about selling off their future “to the highest bidder”. It would almost sound like Floyd likes the concept of their own sovereignty.

I took no pleasure in pointing out that the highest bidder is the Federal Government. The governing document of the New River Valley Sustainability Plan is the HUD grant description, 48 pages alone mandating what grant recipients “must” and “shall” do. It’s called REGIONALISM, folks, and history continues to retell the misery of what top-down bureaucratic government is capable of.

Sooo, the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors voted in favor of the Livability Initiative

Partnership Agreement in May?

They did according to NRVPDC’s main guy. “May 5th,” says Kevin Byrd. On tape, as a matter of fact.I asked him myself, along with four other folks from Floyd, Pulaski and Dublin in a private meeting that included the new “Outreach Facilitator” and “Project Coordinator”. That’s funny, because when I submitted a FOIA request on July 21st to obtain a copy of the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors May minutes, their was nothing in it about a vote to sign the Partnership Agreement. And here it is, July 28th, and this page cannot be found. It only looks like they’ve been posted.

What appeared on the agreement was the signature of County Administrator Peter Huber. Not exactly who the voters elected to make that decision.

The July 25th PuCo Board Meeting, held at Pulaski County High School to

accommodate the crowd….

(I’d estimated 200 in the press release I put out, but somebody else said 400 and the Southwest Times just said “hundreds”) … anyway, there were a LOT of people there. Many of whom were mad as hell. The whole “hub” idea doesn’t win many folks—besides the grant writers and professors and Blacksburg crowd—exactly over.

I presented to the Board the highlights of Dr. Martin Mangino’s dissertation (coming here soon) on why it’s absurd (my word) to make Climate Change part of public policy when the whole rationale is faulty at best. I would add here that Climate Change is politically charged to a criminal degree. Just check out the Obama-Valerie Jarrett-Al Gore Chicago Climate Exchange connection.

I also pointed out how the whole Livability Initiative Abstract—not to mention the HUD Description and all the other dogma-that-ran-over-my-environmental-justice karma thrown in from the EPA and DOT—is loaded up with “social equity” for the underserved.

Social equity/social justice….whatever.

Karl Marx coined the phrase and having survived a number of years growing up in “the projects”, I give my personal guarantee that it wasn’t Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty or HUD’s design inspiration that got me out. I’m pretty sure I could out-ghetto the LI’s “Qualified Experts”, consultants Wallace Roberts and Todd and PlaceMatters, with both hands tied behind my back.

Doesn’t it just figure that now Big Brother’s gonna bring the projects

to the sticks???

But the hands-down worst part of this mind-blower of my green parallel

universe is the recurring scene in my head from this past Monday night

when I’m standing up there in front of the Board of Supervisors and the crowd of “hundreds” and my lips are moving

and I’m waving the papers in front of them showing them that THEY never signed on to this thing,

THEIR APPOINTEE did, so an agreement this-does-not-make and….

the microphone was on, the sound was working,

I read them their Oaths of Office

and despite my best efforts, they could or would not hear.

Other folks tried, too. Asked if they voted to join the partnership, repeating the June 27th meeting, Mr. Conner still could not remember, Chairman Sheffey finally stated that he’s signed the Memorandum of Agreement (not the same thing), Mr. Bopp said he signed whatever Sheffey did and there was a general shrug from the other two.

But wait….it gets spookier. The Roanoke Times / NRV Edition left that part out, and so did

the Southwest Times; Woefully unmentioned is the part where the Board does not have to

opt OUT of something that they never lawfully opted INTO.

I know that back when I was writing about food, and the newspaper publisher wanted me to start writing critiques, I couldn’t do it. I’d slugged it out in the kitchen too many years to want to pick on somebody for a subject as subjective as food.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about a “monumental” (their word) plan to affect every aspect of how people in the New River Valley eat, work, travel and live their lives.

When Kevin Byrd was asked during our private meeting what our Hubs would look like, say in ten years, his reply…

“Whatever you want it to be.”

The Pulaski County Board of Supervisors never voted to join that

partnership.

I seriously doubt that they ever “read the bill”. As Mr. Conner says, “We get so many of them.” At least that was an honest response. The County Administrator “voted” with his signature and the NRVPDC Executive Director backed him up.

There is a referendum recall process in Virginia. I wonder if any of them are aware of that yet.

Laches — negligence or undue delay in fulfilling a legal duty

Liberticide — destruction of LIBERTY

The year is more than half gone as we prepare to commemorate the birth of our nation. And we’ve been after the Town of Abingdon since January to show ICLEI the door.

The Declaration of Independence, the first published document of the American people was forged to assert our un-a-lien-able rights. Rights granted by God.

The difference between unalienable and inalienable? Inalienable rights are those which the possessor may give away. God, incomparably beneficent in His generosity, bestowed us with un-a-lien-able rights, for all of perpetuity. But that doesn’t mean that thieves don’t come stalking at the back door, under the cover of darkness to rob us of our liberty. Or in this case, under the guise of “Sustainable Development”.

EXCUSE ME?? Uhhh, let’s just get HUD, the EPA and the DOT together to figure out HOW and WHERE we will be able to live, work, breathe and GROW and CONSUME food? Let’s not only do it in the NRV, let’s do it throughout the country, sprinkling $100 Million worth of grants around like fairy dust to make sure folks are livin’ right, down to the last detail. Can you say “soviet“? Further, can you even buleev that the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors DID NOT EVEN KNOW THAT THEY HAD VOTED AND PASSED THEIR APPROVAL TO PARTICIPATE? Their Monday, June 27th BOS meeting was a show-stopper! It was a classic movie moment when they all looked at each other to ask if anyone remembered voting on it. Nancy Pelosi would be so proud. We’ll pass it (we did, right?) and then see what’s in it.

Why worry? Executive Director of the New River Valley Planning District, Kevin Byrd, reassured us that the “Livability Initiative” is “whatever you want it to be”. Aaaaahhhh….what a comfort. In a private meeting with Mr. Byrd and his Community Outreach Facilitator, Carol Davis on June 22nd, concerned property owners from Floyd, Pulaski and Dublin were endeared with this news. What if we want to be an Advisory Member on the NRV Sustainable Communities Consortium, curiously lacking any property owner representation on the list of 23 participating groups? “We’ll have to look into that,” we were told—about three different times in the course of our one-hour meeting. No worries, though….because “we’re all about being transparent and all-inclusive!”

We know about ICLEI.

What we don’t understand is why, after sharing copious amounts of information with the Town of Abingdon’s mayor, vice mayor and Town Council, we seem to have a failure to communicate. At least the Washington County Board of Supervisors has chosen to drop their unanimous vote in favor of taking part in the benign-sounding “Virginia Go Green Government Challenge”. The Virginia Municipal League oughta be run outta town on a rail for this ruse that they perpetrate all over the Commonwealth! When did their mission ” to improve and assist local governments through legislative advocacy, research, education“ include sneaking the Kyoto Treaty protocols through the back door into local governments and schools? Exactly when did they decide to do what the United States Senate never ratified and four more countries just abandoned? The Town of Abingdon decided that lowering the carbon footprint by 30% —using ICLEI’s handy software—is a nifty way to address a lifeless economy? Did anyone ever think to consult the voters on this decision? Does Mayor Morgan really think that the Supreme Court should decide if it’s constitutional to hook up with an avowed globalist organization that disdains our national (and individual) sovereignty?

Laches? We don’t need no stinkin’ LACHES.

But, we thought serving up our representatives with a Doctrine of Laches to refresh their memories on the oaths that they took to the Constitution might just be the ticket. So in celebration of 235 years of independence from Britain, we commemorate this historic event by presenting the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors and the Abingdon Town Council with a Constitutional refresher course! Pulaski County was publicly served on Monday, June 27th. Mayor Morgan, Vice Mayor Lowe and Councilmen Jason Berry, Bob Howard and Rick Humphreys are served on Thursday, June 30th. Just a gentle reminder, that…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The DOCTRINE OF LACHES

is based on the maxim that equity aids the vigilant and not those who procrastinate regarding their rights, nor those who neglect to assert a right or claim that, together with a lapse of time and other circumstances, prejudices and adverse party; and by neglecting to do what should, or could, have been done to assert a claim or right for an unreasonable and unjustified time causes disadvantage to another.

It is hereby stated publicly that we perceive the incremental usurpation of our God-granted unalienable rights as an inherent component of the Town of Abingdon’s partnership with ICLEI, a United Nations affilliate, confirmed by the ICLEI Charter.

It is hereby stated publicly that incremental usurpation of our God-granted unalienable rights is an inherent component of the New River Valley Livability Initiative in the threat we feel that it poses to personal liberty and property rights.

And it is hereby stated that we shall endeavor, and by all peaceful means strive to reverse the repressive and dictatorial powers of local and regional government.

After all, this is what YOU said:

Code of Virginia § 49.1 – “I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as [your elected office] according to the best of my ability, so help me God.

White House Rural Council

Agenda 21 and Obama’s Rural Council?

On June 9, 2011, an Executive Order established the White House Rural Council with 25 executive branch departments including Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, National Drug Control, Environmental Quality, Labor, Commerce, Interior, EPA, Housing, Health, Education to name just a few.

The order covers 16% of the American population who lives in rural counties because they “supply our food, fiber, and energy, safeguard our natural resources, and are essential in the development of science and innovation.”

“Strong, sustainable rural communities are essential in winning the future and ensuring American competitiveness in the years ahead.” What kind of future are we supposed to win? Are we losers right now? This is very vague, what years ahead?

“To enhance the Federal Government’s efforts to address the needs of rural America, this order establishes a council to better coordinate Federal programs and maximize the impact of Federal investment to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in our rural communities.” As a world traveler, I can attest that Americans already have the highest standard of living in rural areas, prosperity, and excellent quality of life when compared to anybody else.

A recent article in Washington Post appeared with the innocuous title, “What we need: Smarter growth plans.” The author is Roger K. Lewis, a practicing architect and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Who can possibly object to “smarter growth plans?” Except that “smart growth plans” is the euphemism used by the United Nations for its Agenda 21, a direct assault on private property rights and American sovereignty.

Roger K. Lewis suggests that “smart growth” was designed by market forces driven by “green building.” He makes no mention of Agenda 21 and ICLEI objectives and intrusion into our society since the early 1970s or the agreement signed in 1992 that went under the radar of the American people’s understanding of the complex negative ramifications for our economy and our liberties.

I have not met Americans who think, “sprawl-producing planning, zoning and mortgage templates are obsolete” as the author claims. Would Americans willingly give up their land and homes with or without compensation in exchange for a move to a densely populated high-rise, with no parking garages, no access to cars, like rats fenced in a grey concrete maze?

Communist “social engineering” confiscated land and homes for agriculture. People were forced to move into many-storied, tiny cinder block apartments without any compensation for the land or homes bulldozed. They were forced to commute by bicycles or public transit.

Lewis deems subdivision developments with low-density, detached, single-family homes as outdated. He calls the areas educationally dysfunctional and unsafe. American suburbia was built, he says, on four assumptions that have lost validity today:

Unlimited supply of land

Inexpensive and inexhaustible supply of oil

Homogenous land use

The American dream to own and inhabit a mortgaged house.

I am not sure on what research Lewis based his conclusions, but we have huge domestic oil reserves if permits were issued to drill. We also have a vast land mass. Some areas have 70 or less inhabitants per square mile. Americans still want to own their own home and want to live in a homogeneous community of other homeowners. Just because power hungry bureaucrats at the United Nations have decided to “preserve” land and the environment for the future of the planet and its animals, neglecting the future of humans, does not mean Americans agree to this vision.

“Much of America’s land cannot and should not be developed.” Who are you to decide for us, Mr. Lewis and why? Last time I checked we were free people who determined their own life choices.

“Dependency on oil and limitless use of cars pose daunting environmental,economic, and geopolitical problems.” Who is going to decide the limit to our car use? Is it going to be done by law, more regulations, or executive order?

A handful of environmentalists, the EPA, and the United Nation’s dictators, using faulty debunked data from the University of East Anglia or phony research are trying to separate Americans from their land use, cars, trucks, and the open-wide roads.

Lewis continues his Agenda 21 fallacy. “The traditional nuclear family—mom, dad, two to three kids and one or two pets—is now a minority of America’shouseholds.” I am positive that this man is not describing America that I know and see every day. His statements continue, “Today a majority of households are people, young or old, living alone; couples or sets of unrelated individuals of various ethnicities, ages and tastes.”

Agenda 21 and Mr. Lewis suggest building high-rises in “designated areas within municipalities where new development and re-development is feasible and desirable.” Affordable housing is a priority and so are environmental standards.

It is obvious that “smart growth plans” or Agenda 21 designed by United Nations will affect our future choices in how we live and where. EPA will be involved and will twist the arms of those who do not adopt “smart growth plans,” denying grants to states and cities and levying other penalties. By the time Americans realize the implications of Agenda 21“smart growth,” they will lose their homes and lands with no compensation. At least people who lost property under Eminent Domain have been compensated.

The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) is a conglomerate of 600 national, regional, and local government associations who promote “sustainable development” and protection of the environment because of man-made global warming that does not exist.

“Sustainable development” is the United Nations effort to contain and limit economic development in developed countries and thus control population growth. It is “sustainable de-growth,” plain and simple. The focus is “low-income agriculture” and to set limits on the developed world.

United Nations and its affiliates believe that first world countries polluted significantly during their development while urging third world countries to reduce pollution thus impeding their growth. Implementation of “sustainable development” would revert our society to a pre-modern lifestyle.

ICLEI wants to keep the environment as pristine as possible through “ideal-seeking behavior.” These euphemisms are not clearly defined in terms of what or who will evaluate or set the standards for this “ideal-seeking behavior.”

Agenda 21 sets up the global infrastructure to manage, count, and control assets. It is not concerned with protecting the environment or the world’s resources. Agenda 21 wants change from old sector-centered ways of doing business to new approaches. The “desired future state” should be to pursue “economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social equity.”

“Social equity” is the new euphemism for “social justice” the Marxists in our government have been using a lot lately. Who gave them the authority and the mandate to initiate such change? I do not remember the American people being asked through a referendum whether we wanted our way of life to be fundamentally changed according to mandates set up by the United Nations. How will population growth control be achieved in order to protect the precious environment?

There are four tiers to UN’s “sustainable development” plan:

Environmental sustainability

Economic sustainability

Socio-political sustainability

Cultural diversity.

In 2001 UNESCO, in The Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, stated that cultural diversity is as important as biodiversity in the sense of a more satisfactory, intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual existence. Who is to decide the level and quality of the population’s satisfaction, intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual existence? Human needs must be met while preserving the environment for the future. Again, who will decide what our needs are in order to preserve the future?

In February 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya, ICLEI attended a United Nations conference as representative of the interests of local governments. “In collaboration with partners such as UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance and ICLEI, UNEP (United Nations Environmental Protection) is working to make cities more livable, better prepared for the multiple environmental challenges they are facing, as well as giving them a stronger voice in the international climate negotiations.” Last time I checked, global warming has been debunked as a hoax and UN rapidly changed its name to climate change, continuing the attempt to fleece developed countries. In addition, who decides these international climate negotiations and why? What are we negotiating? Carbon credits?

In October 2009 in Bangkok, ICLEI stated, “local governments are offering national governments our partnership in the fight against climate change.” ICLEI wants local governments to collaborate with national governments to fight against climate change, the very change that has been scientifically debunked.

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution states clearly, “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation, …No State shall,… enter into an Agreement or Compact with another State or with a foreign power…” The counties and cities that are members of ICLEI in the U.S. through its national organization are attempting to implement foreign policy, which our Constitution forbids. What mayors and municipal governments are doing is plain unconstitutional.

“Mayors and local governments set forth the following commitments to implement sub-national, national, and international frameworks by providing resources, authority, and mandate to carry forward climate protection roles and responsibilities.”

There is no law or act of Congress to authorize the aiding and abetting of foreign policy globalism by state and local governments. We have to protect our sovereignty by banning cities and counties to be members of ICLEI, an organization that promotes United Nation’s Agenda 21/“smart growth” which is detrimental to American economic interests, liberty, and sovereignty.

“Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh is a freelance writer (Canada Free Press, Modern Conservative, Anystreet.org, Romanian Conservative, Lucianne) and speaker who recently published a book about her 20-year experience with communist life, “Echoes of Communism,” available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Short essays describe health care, education, poverty, social engineering, and confiscation of property, among other subjects.

“Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh is a freelance writer (Canada Free Press, Modern Conservative, Anystreet.org, Romanian Conservative, Lucianne) and speaker who recently published a book about her 20-year experience with communist life, “Echoes of Communism,” available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Short essays describe health care, education, poverty, social engineering, and confiscation of property, among other subjects.

June 15, 2011

Dear Mayor Morgan and Vice Mayor Lowe,

Thank you for taking the time to meet with us on June 6th. For months now, we have sent you documentation that provides more than ample proof that ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives–is a stealth group that quietly takes a seat in local governments around the world to promote an agenda that is antithetical both to the tenets of the Declaration of Independence and Article 1 Section 10 of the Constitution of the United States, which clearly states: No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation. This is the group with whom the Town of Abingdon has been partnered since 2008.

Mayor Morgan, when Rich Macbeth, representing the 10th Amendment Foundation, again brought this to your attention, your response was that this was a matter that “could be decided by the courts”. I must ask you, does this mean that it would take a Supreme Court ruling to verify what this precise, declarative sentence states? We feel that there is nothing ambiguous about this bedrock law that would necessitate a constitutional court’s assessment.

Again, we have no issue with establishing a recycling program and planting trees, the activities that you mention in relation to working with the Abingdon Go Green Committee. We are proponents of good stewardship of our natural resources. But again, these endeavors are not representative of the true threat that ICLEI and the United Nations Environment Programme pose to the very ideals laid out in the profoundly successful foundation our Constitution has provided. It is distressing, to say the least, to witness the oaths that you and the members of the Town Council take to protect and defend our bedrock laws be treated so cavalierly.

However, signing an agreement to lower the carbon footprint by 30% is another matter entirely. It is incomprehensible that without constituent knowledge or sanction, a commitment could be forged with an alien organization that takes no direction from voting citizens of these united states to engage in instituting an ideology as if it were an exact science with a clear imperative to save the planet. Conveniently ignored is the mountain of evidence to suggest otherwise; the Council has received a summary of the 321-page report that represents 20 times the number of dissenting scientists and climatologists who refute the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, (see attached). Yet sweeping programs—inexplicably promoted by organizations like the Virginia Municipal League—are adopted as gospel!

I mentioned in our meeting that the scope of the Sustainability movement represents a threat that is intent on bringing almost unimaginable, radical change to both urban and rural ways of life. HB3202 was passed in 2007, mandating Urban Development Areas in 67 counties in Virginia, of which Washington County is one. In January both the Council and the Planning Commission were given DVD’s of Virginia Campaign for Liberty’s Donna Holt power point presentation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jd3iDuQ7c) that clearly authenticates what these areas will become.

Please do study the reference sources in Appendix A, where you will find sources for “zero carbon footprint”, the Brundtland Commission, and of course, ICLEI.

You have received articles by the American Policy Center’s Tom DeWeese, who has been steadily ringing this alarm bell for more than 15 years while this movement, with ICLEI at the forefront, has been growing like a cancer.

We think it is past time that this alarm is acknowledged. Awareness must be raised. And ICLEI must go.

TRY THIS: ICLEI REPRESENTED LOCAL GOVERNMENTS at a UN ENVIRONMENTAL MEETING in FEBRUARY 2011!

Posted on 13 May 2011.

The local officials who question or sneer at the idea that ICLEI is some sort of UN plot to take away our sovereignty need to read this from the ICLEI website:

ICLEI holds up the flag for Local Governments at UNEP Governing Council

February 24, 2011

At the UNEP Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GC26/GMEF), that took place from 21-24 February 2011, in Nairobi, Kenya, ICLEI has been flying the flag for Local Governments. ICLEI was in attendance as a Local Authority Major Group Co-Facilitator, a representative of the interests of local governments. (Emphasis mine)The UNEP is the United Nations Enivronmental Programme. Here’s the UNEP website. They are the environmental branch of the UN system:

UNEP, established in 1972, is the voice for the environment within the United Nations system. UNEP acts as a catalyst, advocate, educator and facilitator to promote the wise use and sustainable development of the global environment. To accomplish this, UNEP works with a wide range of partners, including United Nations entities, international organizations, national governments, non-governmental organizations, the private sector and civil society.ICLEI is in deep with this UN agency:

In collaboration with partners such as UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance and ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, UNEP is working on making cities more liveable, better prepared for the multiple environmental challenges they are facing, as well as giving them a stronger voice in the international climate negotiations. The Constitution says NO! NO confederation among local/state governments! PERIOD! They cannot hold up a flag or be part of a representative or part of a stronger voice before UN agencies. Any US city/county/town a member of ICLEI is contributing to an unconstitutional system. I appeal to every veteran or retired veteran or any other patriotic citizen in the local government in any of the 600 ICLEI member cities to do your duty: Simply get out of ICLEI.

On Monday, April 4th

the Abingdon Town Council was

addressed by Catherine Turner,

representing the SWVA Tea Party of

After months of research, Turner and Macbeth presented arguments to the Town Council in favor of dissolving the

Town’s partnership with ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

Perhaps most members of local government have been unaware of the larger agenda that looms beneath the utopian ICLEI-induced scheme. It was apparent during the April 4th presentation to the Town Council that Planning Commissioner Garrett Jackson and Abingdon Go Green Committee colleague Kevin Worley, were highly entertained by what was a very sober report.

Conversely, members of the Tea Party remained well-behaved despite the Council’s unanimous vote in favor of Town Manager Greg Kelly’s authorization of the energy audit presented by Worley, the Director of Parks and Recreation Manager. The plan to spend $19,000 on a survey conducted by Trane Heating and Air seemed strangely coincidental to our purpose for being there. We look forward to seeing how all the Town buildings score on the audit and will keep our fingers crossed that Abingdon taxpayers won’t be forced to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to replace working HVAC systems in these difficult economic times.

……The Climate Mitigation efforts which most everyone is doing or trying to do, will in the future be joined by Climate Adaptation efforts to address/mitigate the effects of climate changes brought on by global warming.

Floyd Bailey, Director of Information Technology, it would appear that the relationship has blossomed from

Town of Abingdon taxpayers who foot the bill.

For just $1800, the United Nations Agenda 21 dogma bought themselves a place in local government. But, go up to anyone on Main Street and ask if they’ve ever heard of ICLEI, inevitably the response is “huhh?” While you’re at it, ask them if the best thing that comes to mind for the current lack of jobs in the area (perhaps we should pose this question to Mr. Cowart) is reducing the carbon footprint.

Never heard of ICLEI? There are more than 600 member locales in the US. And 1220 local government members in 70 countries.

Weeks earlier Mr. Cowart and Town Manager Greg Kelly, Mayor Ed Morgan, Vice Mayor Cathy Lowe and Council Members Jason Berry, Bob Howard and Rick Humphreys each received a packet of documents that detail the relationship of ICLEI to the United Nations Agenda 21.

Included in this portfolio were excerpts of the ICLEI Charter.

As an ICLEI partner, Town of Abingdon explicitly accepts their Charter:

Charter 1.2 – Relationship to Founder Patrons

The Association shall maintain its formal institutional relationships with its founder patrons, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union of Local Authorities

Charter 1.6 Representation Mandate

ICLEI shall serve as an international representative for its members and campaign participants by providing advocacy before national and international governments

From the FOIA request, copies of all the correspondence and communication with the group ICLEI and its group of carefully chosen stakeholders, namely the Abingdon Go Green Committee were released. From this ream of 1000-plus pages and about $600 in “copying/labor” fees later, the relationship with ICLEI became clear. The Go Green Committee, as we learned, is made up of some two dozen or so members, about half of whom are department heads for the Town of Abingdon, (including Jackson and Worley) as well as Mayor Morgan. With Kelly and Cowart acting as the primary liaisons to ICLEI, it would beg the question: How much prior knowledge do they have about ICLEI? Under the guise of “Sustainable Development”, and based on the frequent communication regularly exchanged with ICLEI, are they accepting of the principles of AGENDA 21? Is the Abingdon Go Green Committee complicit with these ideals?

By bringing this to the attention of the Town Council, this question must be raised.

Our mission is not to demonize anyone, but rather to shout from the rooftops all that is

wrong with this arrangement which threatens everything that is intrinsic to the purely and

proudly American ideal of property rights and personal liberty, as set forth in the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

What is “Local Agenda 21″?.Local Agenda 21 is the mandateto local governments to translatethe United Nations Action Planfor the 21st century (Agenda 21)to the local level.

So how did Local Agenda 21 come about?

*In 1987, the Brundtland Commission produced a report entitled Our Common Future. Five years later, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) brought 179 heads of governments together in Rio de Janeiro. It focused world attention on critical issues of sustainability and natural resources, and mapped out a plan of action for future global partnership to achieve concrete goals.

Agenda 21 was one of five documents produced:

the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development

a statement of principles to guide sustainable management of forests

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

The Convention on Biological Diversity

Agenda 21

*The Brundtland Commission, it should be noted, was chaired by Gro Harland Brundtland, Vice Chair of the World Socialist Party. “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” — Brundtland Commission member, Maurice Strong (Chairman, 1992 Earth Summit)

sustainability while protecting global common goods. This approach links local action to internationally agreed-upon

And finally, we point out the recurring theme of “common goods” and “injustice” found in the ICLEI Declaration of Commitment “Social justice”, a term made famous by Karl Marx, interchangeable with “social equity” and the “common good” are tantamount to wealth redistribution, the prime mover that increasingly grows obvious as the core of the sustainable movement and its vanguard, ICLEI.

As the first order of business,

ICLEI conveniently provided the Town of Abingdon their trademark Clean Air and Climate Protection (CACP) software to do a baseline analysis of Town CO2 production, on the built-in, self fulfilling assumption that manmade CO2 levels are the primary drivers of climate. It is seemingly of no consequence that there lacks scientific proof of this. It is in fact the same fallacy perpetuated by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

To illustrate this point, the Climate Depot summary of the 321-page report was provided to the Council, one that updates the 2007 US Senate Report from 400 dissenting scientists and climate researchers to what is now 1000 dissenters. This number is 20 times that of UN scientists who authored the media-hyped 2007 “Summary for Policymakers”.

Climate science, like every other science, is not “settled.” CO2 continues to rise even as the Earth is in a 10-to-20 year cooling trend which began in 1998. It may be recalled that the climate panic of the 1970’s was Global Cooling! The computer generated climate scare stories of Al Gore, Michael Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen in 1988 have not occurred. Further, there is absolutely zero quantifiable evidence that the Town’s goal of 30% carbon reduction would have any impact on climate whatsoever.

Even though mainstream media largely ignored CLIMATEGATE,

the same can’t be said for alternative media heroes, PJTV:

On November 19, 2009, climate science was severely shaken by the release of a collection of email messages, together with a collection of data and data processing programs, that were hacked or revealed by a whistle blower from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), one of the key centers of global warming research. These emails and text files have been the subject of intense debate, calling to question assumptions on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. They are offered here by PJTV/Pajamas Media in conjunction with the Competitive Enterprise Institute/Globalwarming.org for the purpose of education and comment. (http://www.climate-gate.org/)

We must pose the question to the Town Council, the Town Manager and to the Town Grants

and Economic Development Director:

—Why is this huge expense of effort and taxpayer dollars being imposed? How much

taxpayer money has been spent over 2 ½ years of meetings, training sessions,

seminars and exhaustive carbon inventorying of everything from leaf blowers to police

cars to employee commute records involving every department of Town

Government? Has anyone produced a proven cost / benefit analysis of these proposed

has mushroomed under the last three administrations. Federal, state and local programs are burgeoning with it. And it’s

and foreclosure rates. In Oakland CA, where new “sustainable” regulations become law, the average cost to ‘’green” a

home to change out windows, appliances and roofing before it may be sold is $35,000. Once

ICLEI and their minions get into county government and control of the Comprehensive Plan, they codify their self-

determined energy and land rationing quotas and levels of imposed sacrifice. Call

itsocial justice.

The VML also promotes the “Go Green Challenge” in the K-12 school system. It is a sickeningly rich irony

that our country has historically rejected straight-up Marxism, but when it is cleverly repackaged and cloaked in political

correctness as ‘sustainability’, our children are haplessly indoctrinated. The three-legged stool in the VA grades 9-12

Sustainable Communities lesson plan is right out of the Karl Marx / ICLEI handbook.

Our coalition of concerned citizens have engaged in a thorough analysis of Agenda 21 and the supporting role that ICLEI

plays. We’ve spoken with Dr. Martin Mangino, the president of Central Virginia’s Science & Engineers for Energy and

Environment. We spent the day consulting with the preeminent authority on the East Coast, the American Policy Center’s

Tom Deweese, who has been exposing the scam of sustainable development for 15 years—his phone is now ringing off

the hook.

Two months ago, Town Council members and members of the Town Planning Commission each received copies of the DVD featuring Virginia Campaign for Liberty’s Donna Holt on The History of Sustainable Development: Connecting the Dots.

We have attempted to share with the Town Council the history of the United Nations social engineering objective of wealth redistribution, beginning with their 1974 adoption of the “New International Economic Order” to the 1976 Conference on Human Settlements, with the Preamble that famously equates private land ownership with social injustice:

“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset,

controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market.

Private land ownership is also the principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, and

therefore,

contributes to social injustice…”

Under the umbrella term “sustainability,” panels of experts and commissions are dedicated to engineering their enlightened visions of what “must” be done in the areas of land use, energy use, population distribution, and transportation choices. Freedom of individual choice and property rights are seen as irritating impediments. The end game is social engineering and wealth redistribution, plain and simple. Freedom of individual choice and property rights are seen as irritating impediments. The term “sustainability” means whatever the NGO’s and unelected stakeholder groups choose it to mean. The sustainability mantra is a ruse to gain more bureaucratic control over the population. (See the Albermarle BOS “Defund ICLEI” Presentation by Charles Battig, MS, MD)

We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last

200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a

huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people.

Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who said in a FOX Business News interview that ‘the environmental movement has been hijacked by eco-terrorists.’

The Council has also received a copy of the Carroll County MD Times article that details why their Board of Supervisors severed ties with ICLEI. They’ve received copies the cover story from The New American Magazine, “Your Hometown and the United Nations Agenda 21”, recounting horror stories of the impact that these policies have had on industries that are “fleeing California at breakneck speed”.

The Council has been provided information on the Wildlands Project, proving that it is indeed possible to consume the elephant one bite at a time, as great expanses of the US are brought under federal control, off limits to human beings. If it sounds like science fiction, we only wish it were so.

Whether or not Agenda 21 causes Mr. Jackson or any of the rest of his Abingdon Go Green Committee colleagues to lose sleep, the constitutional caution that Rich Macbeth explained before the Town Council is no laughing matter; to the extent that the Town is partnered with ICLEI, each council member stands in violation of their oath of office by implementing foreign policies that are clearly inconsistent with the Constitution of Virginia and of the US Constitution.

Article 1 §10 of the Constitution of the United States of America states:

“NO STATE shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance,

or Confederation…” As a political subdivision of the state, each and every member of our local government who swears

an oath to our Constitution is bound by the same prohibition. Mr. Macbeth went

on to cite several court cases which uphold this precedent.

Under Sustainable Development there can be no concern over individual rights, wants, or needs – as we must all sacrifice for the sake of the environment. The UN’s Commission on Global Governance said in its 1998 report:

“Human activity…combined with unprecedented increases in human numbers…are impinging on the planet’s basic life

support system. Action must be taken now to control the human activities that produce these risks.”

And from Harvey Ruvin, Vice Chair of the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI):

In March 2010, Nor-Cal Produce, a family-owned produce business in West Sacramento, was fined $32,500 by the California Air Resources Board (ARB, or CARB). The company was not charged with, or even accused of, illegal emissions; like many other businesses, it had merely failed to notice a new regulation posted by CARB requiring all semi-trailers, shipping containers, vans, and rail cars with diesel-powered refrigerators to file a report with the agency. “We had no knowledge of the law,” Nor-Cal’s Chief Financial Officer Todd Achando told CalWatchDog, a news blog that monitors California government. “My operations manager happened to see it mentioned in a trade magazine about a year and a half after the deadline passed.” Because Nor-Cal reported itself to CARB and “cooperated,” the agency reduced the $200/day fine from $86,600 to $32,500.

Kit Enger and his fellow dune buggy manufacturers also cooperated with CARB, but found it was like dealing with a mob “protection racket.” Enger, president of the Compliant Car Builders Association in Oceanside, California, said association members attended the agency’s “implementation outreach workshop” for OHRV (off-highway recreational vehicles) and worked “diligently with CARB certification staff to devise a program whereby all industry members could efficiently and effectively certify their vehicles and engines.” Despite the increased costs and inconvenience of complying with CARB’s new regulations, association members thought things were going pretty well — until January 2008 when CARB hit them with $3.6 million in penalties for alleged violations. The association’s lawyers worked the fine down to $600,000, but Enger says even that penalty was unconstitutional, amounting to an ex post facto prosecution for engines modified and sold before the new CARB regulations went into effect.

“My lawyers said it would cost more than $600,000 to fight it, so we might as well pay it. It’s like a protection racket — government out of control,” said Enger. When he testified before CARB in November 2009, Enger told the board that one of their CARB enforcement officers had told him on two occasions, “If you guys don’t get on with this settlement, it doesn’t matter to us if you go out of business, change your name, move to another state, or die, we will find you and attach your assets.”

Thousands of businesses have already fled the “protection racket” of government in what was once known as the Golden State; thousands more are following, taking with them hundreds of thousands of jobs. The state’s tax and regulatory policies have driven the cost of energy, as well as every other business expense, sky high. Yet, despite facing $25 billion in debt, a huge current budget deficit, and default on its bonds (not to mention sky-high unemployment, over 12 percent), the state’s politicians and bureaucrats continue to chase the productive tax base — and jobs — out of California. Joseph Vranich of Irvine, California, known as “The Business Relocation Coach,” keeps a running tab on companies leaving the state. His December 6, 2010 blog carries this headline: “New Record for Calif. Companies Departing or Shifting Work Out: 193 — Nearly Four Times Last Year’s Level.”

The jobs that are leaving or shutting down are not only the manufacturing and resource jobs in companies that greenies love to denigrate as “old, has-been” industries; they include many of the highly touted “green” companies that are now seeking greener pastures elsewhere. One of them is Solyndra, the solar panel maker from Fremont, which announced layoffs of 170 workers in December. Only a few months earlier Solyndra had hosted a much publicized press conference with President Barack Obama and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom lauded the company as an exemplar of the “green economy” that would provide many thousands of new “green jobs.” Solyndra received a $535 million loan from the Department of Energy to build a new state-of-the-art, robotics-run factory, which it calls Fab 2. In November 2010, Solyndra announced it was mothballing Fab 1 and postponing earlier plans to expand Fab 2, citing weak sales and the weak economy.

Other California “green-tech” firms have closed or are shifting much of their operations out of the state. For example:

• Barefoot Motors, maker of electric ATVs, moved to Oregon.

• Mariah Power, a manufacturer of small wind turbines, moved to Nevada and Michigan.

• Sonatype, Inc., which services many high-tech companies, moved to Maryland.

• Adobe Systems, Inc., the software giant, is building its huge new campus in Utah.

Other companies that have jumped ship from California include Fidelity National Financial (moved operations to Florida); CalPortland Cement (closed its Riverside County plant); Buck Knives (moved to Idaho); Multi-Fineline Electronix, Inc. (moved to China); and Thomas Brothers Maps (moved to Illinois and India).

These are only a fraction of the “primary companies” that have made the news; thousands of secondary companies — restaurants, service outlets, retail stores, construction companies, trucking companies, farms, ranches, mom-and-pop businesses — have vanished with no media notice.

And the picture will only get uglier for California, as the state government pushes forward with implementing Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32, formally known as the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. According to a 2009 study by Dr. Sanjay B. Varshney, dean of the College of Business Administration at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), and Dr. Dennis H. Tootelian, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Small Business at CSUS, the impact of the bill’s cap-and-trade and regulatory features could be horrendous. They found:

On average, the annual costs resulting from the implementation of AB 32 to small businesses are likely to result in loss of more than $182.6 billion in gross state output, the equivalent of more than 1.1 million jobs, nearly $76.8 billion in labor income, and nearly $5.8 billion in indirect business taxes…. Accordingly, the total cost of AB 32 is $49,691 per small business in California.

As would be expected, the Varshney/Tootelian study has drawn heated criticism, especially from academics, activists, and politicians still ardently supporting the discredited alarmist “consensus” regarding anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. The critics have produced studies claiming to show that any economic and/or job losses due to AB 32 will be negligible; some even predict positive growth as a result. Of course, many of these critics are the same ones who predicted the massive new “green jobs” that never materialized. Whether or not the Varshney/Tootelian study may have been “defective” in methodology, its predictions appear to be more firmly grounded in reality than those of its critics. The exodus of capital, technology, talent, and jobs from California has been accelerating, and as the CARB “racketeers” begin enforcing the draconian measures provided under AB 32, it will almost certainly pick up more speed.

California’s losses will mean more gains for Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and many other states — but perhaps only temporarily. Many of the states and communities that California companies are fleeing to are headed in the same direction as California. If they do not change course, they soon will see the same economic forces driving the erstwhile California refugee businesses on to Mexico, India, China, and the other usual destinations.

ICLEI, the Hidden UN Component
There is a hidden component to the saga of California’s ongoing woes that is gradually coming to light, hopefully in time to enable other states to avert the same calamity. That hidden component is becoming more visible as we near 2012, which the United Nations will celebrate as the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Known officially as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the eco-confab in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was unprecedented in size and scope, bringing together some 35,000 government officials, diplomats, NGO activists, and journalists. Rio became the launch pad for a number of huge initiatives that have been gradually gaining force and wreaking havoc on the planet in the intervening decades. The five main documents to come out of the UNCED process are:

• The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development

• The Statement of Forest Principles

• The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

• The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity

• Agenda 21

The Climate Change and Biological Diversity conventions were posited as “hard law” treaties that impose binding obligations upon the ratifying parties; the other three are referred to as “soft law” documents, instruments that commit the parties to a path of pursuing later “hard law” commitments. President George H.W. Bush signed the Climate Change Convention in 1992 and the U.S. Senate ratified it the same year. However, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated to implement specific greenhouse gas reductions under the convention, has not been signed or ratified by the United States Senate. Although President Obama declared his commitment to securing a new binding Climate Convention, the November 2010 elections have pretty much sunk chances for any Kyoto replacement passing in the Senate.

Realizing the difficulty in getting some national governments — and especially the United States — to go along with a climate-change treaty that would require massive government intrusion into and regulation of all aspects of energy production and consumption, the UNCED leaders launched simultaneous efforts to build political support for ratification by also initiating efforts aimed at winning enactment of global-warming legislation at the state and local levels. One of the primary instruments that has been used by the UN and globalist advocates to advance their plans is an NGO known as ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability.

“ICLEI was founded in 1990,” its website states, “as the ‘International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives,’” and the organization “is an association of over 1200 local government Members who are committed to sustainable development. Our Members come from 70 different countries and represent more than 569,885,000 people.”

ICLEI-USA boasts of its members: “Their populations range in size from 832 people in Cimarron, New Mexico, to more than 8 million in New York City.” And they “consistently top the rankings of the Greenest Cities,” it adds. “They have led the effort in recent years to envision, accelerate and achieve strong climate protection goals, creating cleaner, healthier, more economically viable communities.”

More than 130 of those ICLEI members are California counties and cities that have led the efforts that now have California mimicking the economic “viability” of Greece and Spain, both of which, by the way, are longtime model supporters and members of ICLEI. Spain, which has been one of the biggest promoters of “green jobs,” has learned the folly of its ways the hard way: It killed more than two existing jobs for every green job created. To make matters worse, many of the green jobs proved to be temporary, vanishing after the subsidized solar panels and wind turbines were constructed. Trodding the same path are California’s ICLEI cities, among which are virtually all the major metro areas — Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco — as well as smaller cities from Alameda to Yountville.

ICLEI’s website informs us:

The Council was established when more than 200 local governments from 43 countries convened at our inaugural conference, the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, at the United Nations in New York.

It notes that in 2003 it changed its name to “ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability,” no doubt to place more emphasis on the “local” and to diminish concerns about its “international” influence and its political and financial ties to the United Nations. As we will show, ICLEI and other UN-affiliated NGOs and government officials have come under increasing suspicion in recent years from more and more American citizens, and have taken to camouflaging their UN-driven environmental agendas, even to the point of denying obvious and easily documented connections.

On its web page entitled “ICLEI: Connecting Leaders,” ICLEI explains some of its networking strategies. They include:

Connect cities and local governments to the United Nations and other international bodies. ICLEI represents local governments at the United Nations (UN) Commission on Sustainable Development, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Conventions on Biodiversity and Combating Desertification and co-operates with the UN Environment Programme and UN-HABITAT.

That seems pretty clear: ICLEI’s mission is to “connect” local government to the UN and its affiliates. It goes on:

Mobilize local governments to help their countries implement multilateral environmental agreements such as the Rio conventions through Cities for Climate Protection, Local Action for Biodiversity and other initiatives.

Again, fairly straightforward: Get the locals to lobby and pressure the national government to hop on board the global programs that will transfer more money, authority, and power to the UN. ICLEI continues:

Forge multi-stakeholder partnerships such as Resilient Cities, a global framework on urban resilience and climate adaptation where local governments, international agencies, development banks, ministries, institutes, and others, collaborate.

Agenda 21’s Stealth Agenda
The ICLEI web page also states that its Local Agenda 21 Model Communities Programme is “designed to aid local governments in implementing Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, the global action plan for sustainable development.” Although the Climate Change Convention has dominated the media headlines and political landscape for many years, Agenda 21 is even more far-reaching and dangerous. As we approach the 2012 Earth Summit, to be convened once again in Rio, this massive environmental, economic, and social “master plan” for the entire planet is being promoted with new intensity.

However, as we have already mentioned, some of the leading proponents of empowering the UN in the name of protecting the global environment counsel their fellow activists to hide their true intentions. That’s exactly what J. Gary Lawrence, an advisor to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and to US AID, advised in a seminar in London, England, entitled, “The Future of Local Agenda 21 in the New Millennium,” sponsored by the United Nations Environment and Development Forum, UK (UNED-UK). After complimenting his British audience for their success in getting the UK to adopt much of the UN’s Earth Summit program, Lawrence lamented, “Other places have been much slower to adopt LA21 [Local Agenda 21].”

“In some cases,” he noted, “LA21 is seen as an attack on the power of the nation-state.” Which, of course, it most definitely is, as we will show. The former Clinton advisor continued:

Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society such as the National Rifle Association, citizen militias and some members of Congress. This segment of our society who fear “one-world government” and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined “the conspiracy” by undertaking LA21. So, we call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.

Yes, over the past two decades much of Agenda 21 and the rest of the Earth Summit program have been enacted piecemeal at the state and local levels, but as “Smart Growth Initiatives,” “Resilient Cities,” “Regional Visioning Projects,” “STAR Sustainable Communities,” “Green Jobs,” and “Green Building Codes.” After going through charades labeled as “local visioning,” “community in-put,” and “consensus building,” one community after another has found that it has enacted a “local” program that is virtually indistinguishable from every other “local” program, whether across the country or across the planet. The more important point, though, is that these initiatives that have been enacted ostensibly to save the environment, invariably destroy economic vitality, erode property rights, undermine liberty and constitutional government, impose soviet-style rule through “stakeholder councils,” subvert local control — and usually devastate the natural environment to boot.

But desperate measures are necessary to “save Mother Earth,” and only a comprehensive, global plan will do, argue the alarmists. The UN’s Agenda 21 is definitely comprehensive and global — breathtakingly so. Agenda 21 proposes a global regime that will monitor, oversee, and strictly regulate our planet’s oceans, lakes, streams, rivers, aquifers, sea beds, coastlands, wetlands, forests, jungles, grasslands, farmland, deserts, tundra, and mountains. It even has a whole section on regulating and “protecting” the atmosphere. It proposes plans for cities, towns, suburbs, villages, and rural areas. It envisions a global scheme for healthcare, education, nutrition, agriculture, labor, production, and consumption — in short, everything; there is nothing on, in, over, or under the Earth that doesn’t fall within the purview of some part of Agenda 21. Copies of the 1,100-page document were hard to come by for several years after its debut at Rio, but I was able to bring back a “media copy” of the five-pound “treasure” from the summit. It is now available online at http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/.

The most accessible version of Agenda 21 to come out following the Rio summit was published under the title AGENDA 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993). Edited by environmental-activist attorney Daniel Sitarz and enthusiastically endorsed by Earth Summit chief Maurice Strong and then-U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), the book is instructive for demonstrating the completely alien mindset that holds sway in so many influential political, academic, and media circles. Sitarz’s edition provides a powerful, albeit unintended, indictment of the UN agreement by offering this candid appraisal of the plan’s totalitarian ambition. Incredibly, Sitarz admits with apparent approval that:

AGENDA 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth…. It calls for specific changes in the activities of all people….

Effective execution of AGENDA 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.

The admission is so staggering as to require recapitulation: “profound reorientation,” “all human society,” “every person on Earth,” “every human action,” “every level,” “demand,” “require.” In short, it is an undisguised call for the total regimentation of all life on the planet.

Nevertheless, editor Sitarz continued his praise for the wondrous text, noting:

There are specific actions which are intended to be undertaken by multinational corporations and entrepreneurs, by financial institutions and individual investors, by high-tech companies and indigenous people, by workers and labor unions, by farmers and consumers, by students and schools, by governments and legislators, by scientists, by women, by children — in short, by every person on Earth.

The tyrannical implications are so stunningly transparent that it seems impossible that any nation not overtly communist could endorse it. Yet it was unanimously endorsed by every nation at the summit, including the United States. Not even Stalin, Hitler, or Mao came close to proposing anything this all-intrusive and all-encompassing.

But the hubris goes much further still. One of the most sacred totems in the UN’s green theology is “sustainable development.” The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide, published in 1996 by ICLEI, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has been an important manual for teaching ICLEI’s “local” acolytes and accomplices the “sustainability” game. It boasts a foreword from former Earth Summit chief Maurice Strong, who currently is president of the council of the UN’s University for Peace. The Guide asks the rhetorical question: “What is Sustainable Development?” It then provides this revealing answer:

The realities of life on our planet dictate that continued economic development as we know it cannot be sustained…. Sustainable development, therefore, is a program of action for local and global economic reform — a program that has yet to be fully defined.

Yes, that is correct; the program that is absolutely essential to our very existence “has yet to be fully defined.” It goes on:

No one fully understands how, or even if, sustainable development can be achieved; however, there is a growing consensus that it must be accomplished at the local level if it is ever to be achieved on a global basis.

There you have it; even though we don’t know what it is, there is a “growing consensus” that it “must be accomplished.”

Much has been written in academic terms about the meaning of sustainable development and the need to integrate ecological and economic principles into personal and public decision-making….

However, there is no agreed definition of the concept and perhaps there is no need for one…. Thus, sustainable development is an “emerging concept” in two ways, first, because it is relatively new and evolves as we learn to grasp its wide implications for all aspects of our lives, and, second, because its meanings emerge and evolve according to local contexts.

In other words, “sustainable development” is a despot’s dream-come-true: an emerging all-purpose, open-ended, “enabling act” granting global central planners carte blanche to claim it means whatever they want it to mean.

Think Globally, Act Locally
For the past several decades, environmental activists have embraced the mantra, “Think globally, act locally.” And they have been implementing it with religious fervor — along with bountiful assistance, of course, from the United Nations and a multitude of UN-affiliated institutions, U.S. government agencies, NGOs, and tax-exempt foundations. ICLEI, which has helped initiate UN programs in hundreds of U.S. communities, works closely with UN agencies such as UNESCO, UNEP, WHO, UNFCCC, IPCC, IMF, and the World Bank, as well as the U.S. State Department, Department of Energy, EPA, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, World Economic Forum, Club of Rome, Rockefeller Foundation, the European Union, and other similar entities. It also receives millions of dollars of funding from many of these same entities, thus enabling it to organize formidable “local” coalitions that often can overwhelm genuine local grass-roots opposition to UN-spawned programs.

However, the correlation of forces in this ongoing struggle may be turning in favor of freedom — though not a moment too soon. When this reporter returned from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and began a national tour with my book Global Tyranny, Step by Step … The United Nations and the Emerging New World Order, far too few people were ready for the message. Even sympathetic radio talk-show hosts found it difficult to believe that the UN’s treaties on climate change and biodiversity, or Agenda 21, could be as serious a threat to America’s sovereignty, prosperity, and freedom as I alleged. Few could appreciate how these documents and programs crafted in some far-off United Nations conference could ever concretely impact them in their state, town, or neighborhood. That has changed dramatically, as the huge financial costs and oppressive regimentation associated with global-warming legislation, sustainable development programs, and local Agenda 21 projects have skyrocketed.

Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center and a leading expert on Agenda 21 and sustainable development, says there “is definitely a major awakening underway.” “These UN stealth programs got by unnoticed and unopposed for many years, but no longer,” he told The New American. “Patriots in communities all across the country are getting wise to the UN programs and are fighting back. Many of the Tea Party activists have awakened to these issues. Our phones have been literally ringing off the hooks with requests for information and speakers to help in local battles against Agenda 21 and sustainable development. 2011 is going to be a very critical year, and I’m encouraged; our side is going to make some major advances on these battlefronts.”

“The growing awareness of the dangers posed by UN programs such as Agenda 21, sustainable development, and the global-warming treaties, is, fortunately causing many Americans to look more critically at the United Nations itself,” John F. McManus, president of The John Birch Society, told The New American. “These are tentacles, but the UN is the octopus controlling the tentacles. And it is our government that is feeding the UN octopus with our tax dollars, which the UN funnels, through a myriad of fronts, into these efforts aimed at destroying our freedoms and empowering the UN as a global government. It’s becoming more obvious each day that The John Birch Society’s half-century campaign to ‘Get US out of the United Nations — and Get the UN out of the US’ — is right on the mark. This should be a major effort of the new 112th Congress.”

Right Side News

Monday, 28 March 2011 05:15 Rick Moran

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorizes a no-fly zone over Libya and the protection of civilians by all means necessary, is the culmination of a decade-long effort to radically strengthen the ability of the UN to intervene in sovereign nations through the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. Behind the initiative are, unsurprisingly, some of the usual suspects: National Security Council adviser Samantha Power and her patron George Soros. Their call to prevent human rights abuses through military intervention masks an agenda to alter drastically the concept of state sovereignty and to allow the United Nations to essentially co-opt the US military.
A 2008 backgrounder produced by The Heritage Foundation on the Responsibility to Protect articulates one of the most dangerous aspects of the doctrine: “R2P would effectively cede U.S. national sovereignty and decision-making power over key components of national security and foreign policy and subject them to the whims of the international community.”What we are seeing unfold in Libya today may very well be a test case for this doctrine: the United Nations has “borrowed” the US military to enforce its idea of Gaddafi’s “responsibilities.” And one question of grave concern is: Might the UN also “borrow” the U.S. and other Western militaries in future to impose its will on member states it feels are not living up to the UN’s nebulous idea of state responsibilities?
Before we examine the ingredients of this potentially catastrophic scenario, a bit of historical background is necessary. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which is deliberately nebulous and ill-defined, is not new. In fact, Hitler’s intervention in the Sudetenland was justified by “humanitarian reasons.” Hitler’s propaganda machine created mass hysteria in Germany by falsely accusing Czechoslovakia of carrying out atrocities against ethnic Germans. Hitler negotiated with Neville Chamberlain on the basis that he was only going to intervene to save lives. Chamberlain may not have bought Hitler’s lies, but Munich occurred nonetheless.
The doctrine was applied sporadically for the next 50 years because military intervention of any kind during the Cold War risked nuclear confrontation. Although the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was justified by Moscow as a “humanitarian” endeavor, there were few other cases.
Once the Soviet Union disappeared, a host of situations occurred in the 1990s that drove debate in the United Nations toward accepting the use of humanitarian intervention to stop governments from killing their own people. The ad hoc nature of these interventions gave an opening to individuals who wished to codify UN intervention into international law. Most of these same people also recognized humanitarian intervention as a means of vastly strengthening the UN, while weakening the sovereignty of nations.
The history of Responsibility to Protect bears this out. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was formed out of the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 with a mandate “to promote a comprehensive debate on the relationship between intervention and sovereignty, with a view to fostering global political consensus on how to move from polemics towards action within the international system.”
The ICISS issued a report in December of 2001 titled “The Responsibility to Protect” that encapsulated “the Commissioners’ views on intervention and state sovereignty and their recommendations for practical action.” The document was sent to the UN for debate and approval.
At the UN, a firestorm broke out over the R2P concept (now the official name of “humanitarian intervention”), largely divided between the industrialized West and the impoverished South. The former colonies only saw a legal way for Western powers to invade them, while the West — including the United States — viewed R2P as a potent weapon to prevent another Rwanda.
The ICISS was chaired by Gareth Evans, former foreign minister for Australia, whose thoughts about the report and sovereignty in particular bear looking at in detail. Mr. Evans sought to turn the debate on sovereignty “on its head” by “characteriz[ing] it not as an argument about the ‘right’ of states to anything, but rather about their ‘responsibility’ — one to protect people at grave risk.”
That “responsibility” is to be defined by the United Nations. Mr. Evans envisions a world where sovereign nations are hardly “sovereign” as we understand the term. Indeed, Evans is seeking nothing less than a brand new definition of sovereignty — what he calls “a new way of talking about sovereignty itself.” The starting point, he says, is that sovereignty “should now be seen not as ‘control,’ as in the centuries-old Westphalian tradition, but, again, as ‘responsibility.’”
No “rights.” No “control.” At least Mr. Evans is willing to let nations keep their borders — for now — although that may also be under threat from R2P. One can imagine the United Nations taking the US to task for trying to keep millions of illegals from crossing our border: We have no “right” to keep hungry, desperate people from seeking a better life. Might our border policies also violate the R2P doctrine? Indeed, such an argument is already being made.
In 2004, the Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a blue ribbon committee to examine the ICISS findings and issue a report to the United Nations. The Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Changeswallowed the “new” definition of sovereignty while recommending R2P be adopted as a matter of policy and law. Their report, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,” recommended that it be the responsibility “of every State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe, mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease.”
In other words, “responsibility” has morphed from the 1990s concept–which entailed that it is up to the world community or voluntary coalitions to intervene where necessary to protect innocents–to a set of rules that sovereign nations themselves must satisfy the United Nations or the hammer will fall.
In direct violation of its own charter, the UN has set itself up as the arbiter of where sovereignty begins and ends, tossing aside Article 51′s “inherent right to self-defense” clause. The Office of the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide at the UN makes this clear. The individual state’s idea of sovereignty takes a back seat to the UN’s judgment: “Sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference; it is a charge of responsibility where States are accountable for the welfare of their people.”

Might R2P also be invoked by Israel’s enemies to target the Jewish State in its war of national survival against the Palestinians? This has already become a reality. Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary Contentions, reports that the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arnç said last week, “We wish that the United Nations had made such resolutions and countries had taken action in the face of incidents in Gaza, Palestine and the other regions.”

Does this explain the surprising decision of the Arab League to allow for R2P to be invoked for Libyan intervention? Recall that the Arab League, the African Union, and numerous other regional developing world organizations originally opposed the concept of R2P. Could the prospect of a UN intervention in Gaza have encouraged the Arab League to back the Libyan adventure?
Even if it didn’t, you can rest assured that the next time Israel feels compelled to defend itself by going into Gaza and taking out terrorists who are attacking it, the League will be crying out for an international response to the “atrocities.” It will contend that Israel is not living up to its “responsibilities” to protect Palestinians. Such an argument will convince many — especially those who are predisposed to hate Israel in the first place. The US will then be in the unenviable position of being forced to veto such action in the Security Council, opening itself up to charges of hypocrisy.
Would we veto such a resolution? With NSC adviser Samantha Power‘s influence on Obama, it is highly questionable. Power is an avid R2P advocate; her 2002 book on the issue, A Problem from Hell, so affected Obama that he invited Power to join his Senate staff as a foreign policy fellow. She also briefly served on his campaign foreign-policy brain trust.
Power is also credited with influencing the president to adopt R2P as part of his foreign policy. But it is her views on Israel that should concern us most of all. She hasa long record of antipathytoward the Jewish State. Ed Lasky, writing in the American Thinker, reports that Power “also advocates that America send armed military forces, ‘a mammoth protection force’ and an ‘external intervention,’ to impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.” Clearly, Power is someone who would readily impose a R2P solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with her anti-Israeli disposition so apparent, what exactly would this solution look like?
Other advocates of the R2P doctrine include numerous Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which promote it for ideological reasons and also because of UN grants and funding. The International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protectbrings together many of these NGOs under one umbrella, where they can be more effective in both lobbying the UN and shaking the international money tree. The list of members is a Who’s Who of internationalists, one worlders, and leftist Utopians, including Oxfam, Citizens for Global Solutions, the International Crisis Group, the World Federalist Movement, Human Rights Watch, and The Stanley Foundation.
What all those groups have in common is a desire to destroy or vastly curtail the sovereignty of nations. And rising above all of them as chief financier and inspiration are George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
There is little doubt that Soros recognized early the kind of power that a vast, worldwide movement could exert and bring him closer to his dream of radically changing the scope of national sovereignty, thus allowing for a new economic and financial system to take hold. He calls himself a “stateless statesman,” which is a good description of how he wants the rest of us to live.

The future of R2P is now. The situation in the small African country of Côte d’Ivoire is spiraling out of control and headed for civil war with the potential for atrocities and mass civilian casualties. Several nations, including the African Union and NGOs involved in the R2P movement, are already calling for military intervention, while the UN has expressed its “alarm” at the deteriorating situation.

Meanwhile, Bashar Assad is killing demonstrators in the streets of Syria, and the world does nothing. Clearly, R2P needs a little fine tuning. The ICISS and UN panel on R2P both advanced the notion of “thresholds” that would have to be crossed before action was contemplated, but the UN has yet to adopt any hard and fast rules about intervention.
Until they do, the Security Council will be fumbling in the dark, confused and hesitant to proceed. But the real danger will come if they ever do get their act together and begin to intervene in the world’s trouble spots in earnest. Given R2P’s broad mandate, which includes “starvation and disease” as responsibilities of member states, the list of countries that would be ripe for intervention is growing considerably. For the proponents of R2P, this is not accidental.Rick Moran is blog editor of The American Thinker,and Chicago editor of PJ Media.His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse.

In Part 1 of this series,

Morgan, Where Did the Love Go?

you read about how it was that the SWVA Tea Party Patriots ended up back on the street again, waving protest signs in front of Morgan Griffith’s offices.

This analogy sums it up nicely:If every penny represents $1 billion, our national debt plus current deficit equals 15,800 pennies. The GOP has removed 10 pennies so far. That’s it. And the Democrats wanted to remove about 4 and 1/2 pennies for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends in October.

And then, there is this:

Every single US man, woman, and child owes almost $200,000 to pay for the deficit + debt + unfunded liabilities.

Then we can throw this log on the fire, from Congressman Steve King, on the one year anniversary of ObamaCare’s passage:

With so many Americans wanting ObamaCare repealed, the time to force the issue is now. In order to ensure that ObamaCare gets pulled out of the U.S.Code by its roots, my strategy encompasses both repealing and defunding the law.I offered an amendment designed to reach back into ObamaCare itself and block the $105.5 billion in automatic funding that the Pelosi-Reid-Obama troika quietly included in the law. It makes no sense to allow any federal funds to flow to a law that has been declared unconstitutional. Although my amendment was blocked from an up-or-down vote on procedural grounds, I am continuing to work to get it included in future continuing resolutions. In fact, I have voted against two recent short-term continuing-resolution extensions that failed to include language blocking ObamaCare’s automatic funding.Hold Obama accountable.

It doesn’t make sense to us, either. Griffith’s vote in favor of the Continuing Resolution that did not include any language to block the built-in $105 Billion for ObamaCare, dismissing the act as “breaking the rules” left us cold. As does failing to take a firm, line-drawn-in-the-sand stand against raising the debt ceiling, the only other foreseeable means to stop ObamaCare along with the rest of the insanity.

We have been left to wonder what inherent meaning there is to the pledge he signed with SWVA Tea Party. Not to mention the hand shake that followed.

This past week was the congressional spring break. Morgan Griffith held no Town Halls in his home district. There was no information on his schedule of events available from either his website or any of his offices. Despite his comment to FOX Radio Roanoke 910 news, his desire to speak to the Tea Party failed to translate to contacting any of the SWVA Tea Party groups to arrange a meeting.

But perhaps most disturbing is the follow-up of the

mysterious Christiansburg “office policy”

that dispersed last weeks protesters when met by the Chief of Police at Morgan Griffith’s West Main Street office. Upon being informed by the Chief that they would need a permit, some of the group departed, one member left to get the paperwork and a few folks stayed on, citing their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble. (In Part 2, you read about how we take our rights, guaranteed by both the Virginia and US Constitutions, very seriously.)

This is the information on the back of the form that was filed:

Application for Permit to Conduct a Picket from Town of Christiansburg: (identified on the front of the form as Picket Form 10/05/2000)§ 40.1-53. Preventing persons from pursuing lawful vocations, etc.; illegal picketing; injunction.

No person shall singly or in concert with others interfere or attempt to interfere with another in the exercise of his right to work or to enter upon the performance of any lawful vocation by the use of force, threats of violence or intimidation, or by the use of insulting or threatening language directed toward such person, to induce or attempt to induce him to quit his employment or refrain from seeking employment.

No person shall engage in picketing by force or violence, or picket alone or in concert with others in such manner as to obstruct or interfere with free ingress or egress to and from any premises, or obstruct or interfere with free use of public streets, sidewalks or other public ways.

Any person violating any of the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and punished accordingly.Notwithstanding the punishments herein provided any court of general equity jurisdiction may enjoin picketing prohibited by this section, and in addition thereto, may enjoin any picketing or interference with lawful picketing when necessary to prevent disorder, restrain coercion, protect life or property, or promote the general welfare.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Obviously, this permit references Virginia’s “right to work” laws, and mentions nothing regarding a political protest or rally.

But the mystery continues….

One of the members of the New River Valley Tea Party, not really satisfied with all the conflicting information disseminated by Griffith’s Chief of Staff, district office and Bristol Herald Courier newspaper account decided to stop back into the Christiansburg Business License office where the March 16th permit is filed. When he requested a new “Application for Permit to Picket” form, HE WAS INFORMED THAT NO PERMIT IS NECESSARY BECAUSE THERE IS NO ORDINANCE TO BACK IT UP!

When he asked for a copy of the previous form, the back was blank where § 40.1-53 previously appeared.

Which would only make sense, given that this was all about an office policy that resulted from the Arizona shooting, only it’s not written or recorded anywhere for public reference so they can’t really send you a copy of it. It requires law enforcement to be notified—although Griffith said his office did not call the police—and law enforcement requires obtaining a Permit to Conduct a Picket, only now it doesn’t because there’s not an ordinance to actually back it up.

A tea party supporter from Patrick County stopped by Morgan Griffith’s office on Wednesday, March 16th on his way to Blacksburg. His wife had told him about the protest. When the gentleman decided to talk to some of the nice office ladies about some of the issues and asked Griffith’s office manager why the police were there, he was told that the DC office instructed them to “phone the police and have them insist on a permit or disband.”

So Griffith’s staff didn’t call the police on the protestors—only they did. Because of this ‘new policy’. So, here’s the question: Does ”Office Policy” trump the US and Virginia Constitution? Ninth District Liberty Coalition member Phil Spence, after speaking at length with Griffith’s Chief of Staff, Kelly Lungren, isn’t satisfied with the Congressman’s response.

So he asks the Governor. Here is his letter:

P O Box 333 New New Castle, VA 24127-0333

The Honorable Bob McDonnell

GovernorP.O. Box 1475

Richmond, Virginia 23218

Governor McDonnell,

On Wednesday, March 16, 2011, the Ninth District Liberty Coalition, in conjunction with members from The New River Valley TEA Party, arrived in front of U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith’s office to peaceably protest his recent house votes.

Upon arrival we were met by the Christiansburg Chief of Police who informed us that Representative Griffith’s office had notified his office of our planned visit. Police Chief Sisson stated that we must have a permit to assemble or we would be cited with disorderly conduct. We asked Chief Sisson if we refused a permit and refused to disperse after a citation, would he arrest us, Representative Griffith’s constituents? His response was that he hoped it would not come to that.

At this point, it must be stated that Chief Sisson treated us respectfully and behaved with professionalism. We believe Chief Sisson was put into a position that was unfair to him, that of being called to the scene by Representative Griffith’s office.

Sir, this behavior by our “representative” is seen by us to be a constitutionally questionable action which is unacceptable to us, the citizens of Virginia. The response coming from Representative Griffith’s office was that this is now “office policy” and that the Sergeant-At-Arms had “privately” advised House members to follow this policy. This too is wholly unacceptable to us in that rules which concern us are being made in “private”—and that we are not able to see or access these rules, or this process. Where is the constitutional justification for this process?

Speaking for my own conscience, I did not on this day seek a permit, and at no point in the future shall I ever ask permission from my “representative” or any other form or face of government, for any behavior, speech or action, that I as a sovereign citizen of this commonwealth undertake.

Article 1, Section 2, Constitution of Virginia

That the freedom of speech and the press are among the great bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained

except by despotic governments, that any citizen may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all

subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; that the General Assembly shall not pass any law

abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, nor the right of the people peaceably to assemble and

petition the government for the redress of grievances.

As the Governor of this Commonwealth and past Attorney General, how, in the light of this passage, can any county or corporate subdivision whatsoever have or enforce a statute that could in any way supersede my birthright of freedom of assembly?

Today we know not the names of or how many patriot martyrs paid in blood for this guarantee of our liberty preexisting:

Article 1, Section 1, Constitution of Virginia

That all men are by nature equally independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into

a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and

liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Where is the compact that we the people have acceded to, whereby the corporate entity of Christiansburg, may for one moment by any corporate by-law or statute presume upon the liberties of the people?

Sir, your endorsement of U.S. Representative Griffith indirectly enjoins you in this matter.

Your standing as first civil magistrate on the Commonwealth of Virginia with a constitutional trustee obligation to the people of Virginia directly enjoins your response.

At this time we place the issue forward and stand in necessity of your answer and direction

We anticipate your speedy reply of assurance that you stand with us as we proceed in this situation. As always, our hand of cooperation is extended to help propel Virginia forward.

With Highest Regards,

Phillip H. Spence

CC: Attorney General, The Honorable Ken Cuccinelli

The Honorable Mr. George Allen

Here is Attorney General Cuccinelli’s reply:

Dear Mr. Spence:

Thank you for contacting the Office of Attorney General Kenneth T.
Cuccinelli, II.

This office however is prohibited by code from providing legal
opinions or advice to private citizens. Section 2.2-505 of the Code
of Virginia is the statutory provision that authorizes the Attorney
General to render official advisory opinions. The statute provides
that:

A. The Attorney General shall give his advice and render official
advisory opinions in writing only when requested in writing so to do
by one of the following: the Governor; a member of the General
Assembly; a judge of a court of record or a judge of a court not of
record; the State Corporation Commission; an attorney for the
Commonwealth; a county, city or town attorney in those localities in
which such office has been created; a clerk of a court of record; a
city or county sheriff; a city or county treasurer or similar officer;
a commissioner of the revenue or similar officer; a chairman or
secretary of an electoral board; or the head of a state department,
division, bureau, institution or board.

The General Assembly has not authorized the Attorney General to render
an official opinion except as expressly provided. I regret that this
Office is unable to respond to your request.

On Wednesday, March 16th,

members of the Southwest VA Tea Party Patriots of Abingdon and

Bristol convened in front

of Morgan Griffith’s office on West Main in Downtown Abingdon.

About 13 of us showed up, waving Gadsden ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ flags and carrying signs that read “Cut Spending!”… “Defund ObamaCare!”… “Griffith Signed a Pledge!”… “Republicans: GROW A SPINE!!”

The irony was undeniable, given that our old digs in front of the former 28-year incumbent Congressman Boucher’s now-empty office is just down the street, on the opposite end of Main. We got to know that corner pretty well. That was where the fledgling Tea Party got to know one another well enough to become the core group that continues to stick together through the nauseous, serpentine ride that is post-modern politics—the kind that we may be assured that our country’s Founders anticipated, having the wisdom to craft the inimitable gift that is our Constitution, beyond compare to any other nation’s in history.

Together we tasted the defeat of the Tea Party’s pick for the run for Congress. Was there any one of us there on that day last May who didn’t emerge from the Ft. Chiswell High School auditorium dazed and confused by a goofed-up primary that sent Washington County to the gymnasium for a “re-count”, like a bunch of third graders for a fire drill? With the projection that Adam Light supporters would flip their vote for Dave Moore in the second round Griffith vs. Moore showdown, was there any one present who didn’t feel slightly stupefied that despite the large turnout for both candidates, no run-off materialized? Griffith was declared the winner after the first round.

Sour grapes? More like a lingering bad taste in your mouth. There could be no mistaking the fact that the Republican party’s support was firmly in place behind Morgan Griffith, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates since 1994 and Majority Leader since 2000. We didn’t get “our” guy, but could this marriage be saved?

We’d gotten regular calls from the Griffith Campaign for a couple of months. “Can you get some folks together for a rally?” Still, the old admonition of why-buy-the-cow-when-you-get-the-milk-for-free was the nagging refrain.

ONLY IF HE WOULD AGREE TO A PRE-NUP. After months of stump speeches, along with five other District 9 Tea Party groups, the Abingdon / Bristol Patriots accepted Griffith’s proposal, with the caveat of “mutual” support. Our big ticket items were no surprise to anyone; in exchange for our support, Griffith would have to pledge to diligently work to restore constitutionally limited government. Fiscal conservatism. And Defunding ObamaCare. Last October 14th we sealed the deal with our signatures and his. We went full-swing into knocking on doors, passing out literature, making phone calls and getting folks out to rally for the Griffith campaign stops.

It should also be no surprise to anyone that rather than idolizing Griffith– a supporter of the Patriot Act and not exactly enamored with the concept of term limits—our fervor was more symptomatic of an obsession to topple the reign of Rick Boucher.

Prior to the March 15th Continuing Resolution that would feed our morbidly obese government for another three weeks, a tidal wave of faxes, emails and phone calls rattled Griffith’s offices urging him to get on board with Bachmann and King, members of the Tea Party Caucus. Showing true grit, they had a plan to go up-front-and-center to address the $105 Billion ObamaCareBucks.

In stark contrast, here is Morgan’s response, issued in his March 14th E-Newsletter:

“I support defunding this egregious law, but using the Continuing Resolution to do so is not the proper vehicle. House rules do not allow for it. The appropriate legislative mechanism is one where mandatory spending, such as the $105.5 billion allocated for ObamaCare implementation, can be altered.

“….the integrity of the institution”???? Excuse me? Deference is being given to integrity here, referencing the behemoth that swallows up one-sixth of our economy and was shoved down the throats of an electorate that soundly rejected it along with the thug tactics employed to pass it? The nuclear-option-if-necessary/ Louisiana Purchase/Corn Husker Kickback/Stupak Sell-Out/Pass-it-to-see-what’s-in-it 3000-page Marxist/Socialist Valentine?

Even though Steve King had been making noise for months, arguing the case that this could systematically defeat the 111th Congress’ pre-appropriation of funds that effectively makes the 112th Congress irrelevant on this issue…..without the backing of Boehner and Cantor, it fizzled.

However, on March 15th, fifty-four GOP congressmen stood up against the weak-kneed party leadership and voted no on the Continuing Resolution.

On the same day that the vote carried to cut $6 billion, the US borrowed $4 more billion, just like every other single day of the week.

On that same day our national debt jumped $72 billion. And on that same day this opportunity to Defund ObamaCare was lost.

Morgan Griffith voted in favor of the Continuing Resolution.

So, on March 16th, here we are again, back out on the street with poster boards and magic markers.

Weird side note: How odd is it that Jeremiah Heaton, the 2010 Indie candidate just happens by while we’re waving our signs in front of Morgan’s place?!? Plenty. Apparently Jeremiah just can’t stay out of the limelight, but if he thinks he’s got a foot in the Tea Party door for a re-match the next time around, we’ve already written that story once.

But wait—it gets weirder.

When members of the New River Valley and Pulaski County Tea Parties along with SWVA Liberty Coalition are simultaneously gathering in front of Morgan Griffith’s Christiansburg office, the Chief of Police was there to greet them. Kinda makes you wonder, given that all the time we spent in front of Boucher’s office, we never even once had a squad car pull up.

That particular story is still being written and will appear as Part 2 on this blog.

RED STATE

Allow me to explain what the House Republicans are doing — not that they will ever admit it.

The House Republicans leaders are scared to death of shutting down the government, never mind that a shutdown is really just a slow down.

The House Republicans leaders absolutely, unequivocally do not want a shut down. Mean time, the Democrats would love a shutdown. They remember 1995, and they remember that it was the government shutdown of 1995 that put Bill Clinton back in the driver’s seat.

While all of this is going on, we have Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid saying we cannot defund the National Endowment of the Humanities because no one would show up at a cowboy poetry festival in Nevada.

With the House Republicans’ unwillingness to shut down the government, they’ve out negotiated themselves. But the leadership and its inability to effectively whip its own freshman means the leadership needs a plan to scare the beejeezus out of Freshman Republicans. That plan requires a three week continuing resolution.

Let me tell you why.

What comes up in April? The debt ceiling debacle.

Merging the continuing resolution debate and the debt ceiling debate together would be the worst possible situation for conservatives. It would limit their negotiating position for substantive cuts when the clock is ticking toward what Democrats and Republican leaders are calling not just a shut down situation, but a default situation.

If a continuing resolution and debt ceiling debate were merged, moderates would be empowered to push for minimal cuts, no defunding of Obamacare, no defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, no defunding of Planned Parenthood, etc. Republican leaders in the House and Democratic leaders in the Senate would be in the comfy position of being able to ignore conservatives in the name of a “good government compromise,” which is Washington Speak for growing the size and scope of government while pretending not to.

It is crucial for conservatives to fight against the short term CR and force the Democrat and Republican Leaders to sit down now and start making real cuts. The cuts the Republicans are proposing are a drop in the bucket to real reform.

The voters put the GOP in power to cut the size of government. It is time to do just that.

Yet to some tea party activists in southwest Virginia, Griffith has not been conservative enough. And they’re letting him know it, staging protests Wednesday at his district offices in Abingdon and Christiansburg.

Local tea party groups – six of which will be represented at the protests, according to a release – are upset that Griffith didn’t favor using the latest short-term spending resolution, which passed the House Tuesday, as a vehicle for defunding the health-care measure. Griffith voted for Tuesday’s bill, while 54 fellow Republicans voted against it.

“We feel very strongly that this needs to be addressed and we don’t feel the House majority leadership is addressing that,” Southwest Virginia Tea Party organizer Catherine Turner said Wednesday.

Specifically, Turner and her allies want Griffith to back an effort by Reps. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) to take back $105 billion they claim was “buried” in the health-care measure. (The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has examined Bachmann’s assertion and found that “her claim that this money was ‘hidden’ does not have credibility.”)

In a statement issued by his office Tuesday, Griffith said he agreed with the aim of Bachmann and King, just not their method.

“I support defunding this egregious law, but using the Continuing Resolution to do so is not the proper vehicle,” Griffith said. “House rules do not allow for it. The appropriate legislative mechanism is one where mandatory spending, such as the $105.5 billion allocated for ObamaCare implementation, can be altered.”

Turner noted that Griffith “was not our original candidate” for the seat, which he won by defeating vet­eran Rep. Rick Boucher (D). Griffith secured the nomination with the support of much of the GOP establishment, but didn’t have the initial backing of some tea party groups. But they pledged to support Griffith in October in exchange for his vow to pursue a series of conservative goals, including “to diligently work to cut the size of government” and “to defund and repeal the health care bill.”

Turner said she and her fellow activists would watch Griffith closely to make sure he adhered to those pledges.

It wasn’t much of a honeymoon.

Protests will take place at Congressman Morgan Griffith’s offices in Abingdon and Christiansburg on Wednesday, March 16th at 12PM. Griffith’s office staff will be presented with copies of the Mutual Pledge of Support signed by Morgan Griffith and representatives of six Southwest Virginia Tea Parties along with the King-Bachmann pledge to Congress to remediate the $105 Billion pre-appropriated ObamaCare funding buried in the Health Care Legislation as part of the March 18th Continuing Resolution.

In exchange for the support of tea parties all across Southwest Virginia, on October 14, 2010 Candidate Morgan Griffith signed a pledge to defund ObamaCare and to work diligently to restore fiscal conservatism and constitutionally limited government. While Congressman Griffith’s March 14th statement professes repugnance for the Pelosi Congress’ penchant for “breaking the rules”—to the tune of hiding billions in pre-appropriated health care funding in the unpopular bill—his constituents of the 9th District object to the effete Republican response to the issue and Griffith’s abnegation of the promise he made to voters.

FOX Radio 910 Roanoke talk show host Marcus Wagner will join protesters in Christiansburg and videos of each demonstration will be posted on youtube.

For Immediate Release Contact: Beth Breeding

March 14, 2011 202-225-3861

GRIFFITH STATEMENT ON OBAMACARE AND THE CRWASHINGTON – Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) issued the following statement today regarding the defunding of ObamaCare through the Continuing Resolution (CR):

“One of my first votes in the U.S. House of Representatives was to repeal ObamaCare. While the repeal passed the House, the Senate has failed to take action. In order for legislation to become law, it requires passage by both chambers and the President’s signature.

“I support defunding this egregious law, but using the Continuing Resolution to do so is not the proper vehicle. House rules do not allow for it. The appropriate legislative mechanism is one where mandatory spending, such as the $105.5 billion allocated for ObamaCare implementation, can be altered.

“I do not want a Nancy Pelosi style of government where we disregard the rules and run roughshod. Instead, I want a government that follows the rules, preserving the integrity of the institution. Following the rules can be frustrating at times, but it is one aspect of the 112th Congress that differs from the 111th.”

The Southwest Virginia Tea Party Patriots of Abingdon and Bristol held a meeting last night during which your letter addressing the national debt ceiling was read. In summary, we are not satisfied with political doublespeak and demand to know your position.

Attached is your colleagues’ letter to Speaker Boehner, Leader Cantor and Chairman Rogers from House Representatives Steve King and Michelle Bachmann. They are seeking the commitment of their fellow members to strike the $105.5 Billion theft of taxpayer money from FY11CR. Here is an excerpt of that letter:

We recognize the work to defund ObamaCare began with the inclusion of language in HR 1 to restrict annual appropriations from being used to implement the law. However, we recognize that even this language, if enacted, leaves on the table the $105.5 Billion in automatically appropriated funds for the law’s implementation. We cannot successfully defund ObamaCare without shutting off these automatically appropriated funds.

As Candidate Morgan Griffith the pledge that you signed along with six Tea Party representatives from all across Southwest Virginia in exchange for our support includes promising fiscal conservatism, diligently working to cut the size of government and the commitment to defund and repeal the Health Care Bill. We feel that the position you are taking on this issue as Congressman Morgan Griffith should already be decided.

We fully expect that in honoring our pledge that you will join the efforts of Bachmann and King in excoriating the egregious crime that continues to be perpetrated on our country, known as ObamaCare.

We would like your immediate reassurance that this is, in fact, the case.

Washington D.C.- Congressman Steve King (R-IA) and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) released the following pledge to House Republican Leadership calling for all $105.5 billion in automatic appropriations to ObamaCare to be struck by the FY11 CR. King and Bachmann call upon all Members of the U.S. House of Representatives to sign onto the pledge to vote “NO” on any continuing resolution proposal that does not include language that cuts off the automatic funding that was written into ObamaCare by the Pelosi Congress in 2010.

If the House has the courage to not raise the debt ceiling, the Senate and the White House will be forced to craft a budget that fits within the current budget ceiling. That will force REAL SUBSTANTIVE BUDGET CUTS, as neither side will have a choice.

There is nothing the Senate or the White House can do about it, if House Republicans have the courage to do it.

That is the change that people voted for in 2010. Not the typical “politics as usual” and watered down garbage that is exemplified by the current GOP budget.

As Governor McDonnell’s plans for sustainable development, referred to as “sustainable communities”, continues to gain momentum, it is worthwhile to step back and take a long look at the big picture, painted with a broad brush to reveal what Virginia might look like as his vision for the Commonwealth is more fully implemented over the next 20 years or so.

The picture painted here is based on official documents published by countless government agencies and non-government organizations during the past two decades as public policy for the transformation of our great nation for a “Sustainable America”. These documents were rarely reported in the news, and average working people have no idea what sustainable development really means, and even less knowledge of what is in store for the future. If the vision of sustainable development continues to unfold as it has in the last decade, life in the Commonwealth and the rest of the nation will be quite different in the future. Click on MAP to Enlarge

Sustainable Communities: The Vision

Half the land area of Virginia and the entire United States will be designated “wilderness areas,” where only wildlife managers and researchers will be allowed. These areas will be interconnected by “corridors of wilderness” to allow migration of wildlife, without interference by human activity. Wolves will be as plentiful in Virginia as they are now in Idaho and Montana.

Surrounding these wilderness areas and corridors, designated “buffer zones” will be managed for “conservation objectives.” The primary objective is “restoration and rehabilitation.” Rehabilitation involves the repair of damaged ecosystems, while restoration usually involves the reconstruction of natural or semi-natural ecosystems. As areas are restored and rehabilitated, they are added to the wilderness designation, and the buffer zone is extended outward.

Buffer zones are surrounded by what is called “zones of cooperation.” This is where people live – in “sustainable communities.” Sustainable communities are defined by strict “urban growth boundaries.” Land outside the growth boundaries will be managed by government agencies, which grant permits for activities deemed to be essential and sustainable. Open space, to provide a “viewshed” and sustainable recreation for community residents will abut the urban boundaries. Beyond the viewshed, sustainable agricultural activities will be permitted, to support the food requirements of nearby communities.

Sustainable communities of the future will bear little resemblance to the towns and cities of the 20th century. Single-family homes will be rare. Housing will be provided by public/private partnerships, funded by our state treasury, and managed by non-government “Home Owners Associations.” Housing units will be designed to provide most of the infrastructure and amenities required by the residents. Shops and office space will be an integral part of each unit, and housing will be allocated on a priority basis to people who work in the unit – with quotas to achieve ethnic and economic balance. Schools, daycare, and recreation facilities will be provided. Each unit will be designed for bicycle and foot traffic, to reduce, if not eliminate, the need for people to use automobiles.

Transportation between sustainable communities, for people and for commodities, will be primarily by rail systems, designed to bridge wilderness corridors where necessary. The highways that remain will be super transport corridors, such as the “Trans-Texas Corridor” now being designed, which will eventually reach from Mexico to Canada. These transport corridors will also be designed to bridge wilderness corridors, and to minimize the impact on the environment.

Consequences of Sustainable Development

What is perhaps the most serious consequence of sustainable development is the least visible: the transformation of the policy-making process. The idea that government is empowered by the consent of the governed is the idea that set the United States apart from all previous forms of government. It is the principle that unleashed individual creativity and free markets, which launched the spectacular rise of the world’s most successful nation. The idea, and the process by which citizens can reject laws they don’t want, simply by replacing the officials who enacted them, makes the ballot box the source of power for every citizen, and the point of accountability for every politician.

When public policy is made by elected officials who are accountable to the people who are governed, then government is truly empowered by the consent of the governed. Sustainable development has designed a process through which public policy is designed by professionals and bureaucrats, and implemented administratively, with only symbolic, if any, participation by elected officials and the public. The professionals and bureaucrats who actually make the policies are not accountable to the people who are governed by them.

This is the “new collaborative decisions process,” called for by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and is being used to steer communities to a “consensus” of a predetermined goal. Because the policies are developed at the top, by professionals and bureaucrats, and sent down the administrative chain of command to state and local governments, elected officials have little option but to accept them. Acceptance is further ensured when these policies are accompanied by “economic incentives and disincentives,” along with lobbying and public relations campaigns coordinated by government-funded non-government organizations.

Higher housing costs are an immediate, visible consequence of sustainable development. Land within the urban growth boundary jumps in value because supply is limited, and continues to increase disproportionately in value as growth continues to extinguish supply. These costs must be reflected in the price of housing. Add to this price pressure, the regulatory requirements to use “green seal” materials; that is, materials that are certified, either by government or a designated non-government organization, to have been produced by methods deemed to be “sustainable.”

Higher taxes are another immediate, visible, and inevitable consequence of sustainable development. Higher land values automatically result in higher tax bills. Sustainable development plans include another element that affects property taxes. Invariably, these plans call for the acquisition of land for open space, for parks, for greenways, for bike-and- hike trails, for historic preservation, and many other purposes. Governor McDonnell includes plans for a trust fund to acquire land for affordable housing and provide financial assistance to low-income residents and those affected by foreclosure and for the homeless. Every subsidy and piece of property taken out of the private sector by government acquisition, forces the tax burden to be distributed over fewer taxpayers. The inevitable result is a higher rate for each remaining taxpayer.

Another consequence of sustainable development is the gross distortion of justice. Bureaucrats who draw lines on maps create instant wealth for some people, while prohibiting others from realizing any gain on their investments. In communities across the country, people who live outside the downtown area have lived with the expectation that one day, they could fund their retirement by selling their land to new home owners as the nearby city expanded. A line drawn on a map steals this expectation from people who live outside the urban growth boundary. Proponents of sustainable development are forced to argue that the greater good for the community is more important than negative impacts on any individual. There is no equal justice, when government arbitrarily takes value from one person and assigns it to another.

Nowhere is this injustice more visible than when eminent domain, conservation easements, and regulations designed to manipulate the homeowner into surrendering his property in despair, is used to implement sustainable development plans. The Kelo vs. The City of New London case brought the issue to public awareness, but in cities throughout the nation, millions of people are being displaced, with no hope of finding affordable housing, in the new, “sustainable” community. In Florida, this situation is particularly acute. Retirees have flocked to Florida and settled in mobile home parks to enjoy their remaining days, living on fixed incomes, too old or infirm to think about a new income producing career. Local governments across the state are condemning these parks, and evicting the residents, in order to use the land for development that fits the comprehensive plan, and which produces a higher tax yield. These people are the victims of the “greater good,” as envisioned by the proponents of sustainable development. Housing is considered “affordable” if median home prices in an area are no more than three times the median household income in that area. This ratio is called the “median multiple”. By the time sustainable development reached it’s peak in California, the median multiple reached 10. Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, and Richmond were the first in Virginia to adopt the policies with the same consequences reaching the median multiple of 4.1 – 5.7.

Less visible, but no less important, is the erosion of individual freedom. Until the emergence of sustainable development, a person’s home was considered to be his castle. William Pitt expressed this idea quite powerfully in Parliament in 1763, when he said:

”The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow through it – the storm may enter, the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter – all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”

No more. Sustainable development allows king-government to intrude into a person’s home before it becomes his home, and dictate the manner and style to which the home must conform. Sustainable development forces the owner of an existing home to transform his home into a vision that is acceptable to king-government. Sustainable development is extinguishing individual freedom for the “greater good,” as determined by king-government.

Sustainable Development: Conclusion

The question that must be asked is: will sustainable development really result in economic prosperity, environmental protection, and social equity for the current generation, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?

Even in the early days of this century-long transition to sustainability, there is growing evidence that the fundamental flaws in the concept will likely produce the opposite of the desired goals. Forests that have been taken out of productive use in order to conform to the vision of sustainable development have been burned to cinders, annihilating wildlife, including species deemed to be “endangered,” resulting in the opposite of “environmental protection.” Government- imposed restrictions on resource use in land that is now designated “wilderness,” or “buffer zones” have resulted in shortages, accompanied by rapid price increases that result in the opposite of “economic prosperity.” In sustainable communities, it is the poorest of the poor who are cast out of their homes to make way for the planners’ visions; these victims would not define the experience as “social equity.”

Detailed academic studies show that housing costs rise inevitably as sustainable development is implemented. Traffic congestion is often worsened after sustainable development measures are installed. Just ask those in Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, and Richmond where the principle of sustainable communities was adopted nearly a decade ago. And always, private property rights and individual freedom are diminished or extinguished.

Sustainable development is a concept constructed on the principle that government has the right and the responsibility to regulate the affairs of people to achieve government’s vision of the greatest good for all.

The United States is founded on the principle that government has no rights or responsibility not specifically

granted to it by the people who are governed. These two concepts cannot long coexist. One principle, or the

other, will eventually dominate. For the last 20 years, sustainable development has been on the ascendency,

permeating state and local governments across the land. Only in the last few years have ordinary people begun to

realize that sustainable development is a global initiative, imposed by the highest levels of government. People

are just beginning to get a glimpse of the magnitude of the transformation of America that is underway.

The question that remains unanswered is: will Virginians accept this new sustainable future that has been planned for them and imposed upon them? Or, as Virginians have done in the past, will they rise up in defense of their freedom, and demand that their elected officials force the bureaucrats and professionals to return to the role of serving the people who pay their salaries, by administering policies enacted only by elected officials, rather than conspiring to set the policies by which all the people must live.

Donna Holt

Campaign For Liberty‘s Mission is to promote and defend the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy, by means of educational and political activity.

over policy differences

The Carroll County Board of Commissioners has made it clear it believes there is a distinction between “sustainability” and “environmentalism.”

On Jan. 12, the new, five-member board unanimously voted to terminate its membership with the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an organization that provides technical consulting, training and information services to support local government in the implementation of sustainable development at the local level.

Board President Doug Howard, R-District 5, said the definition of sustainability has changed over time to no longer just focus on protecting and preserving the environment, which is now environmentalism. Sustainability, Howard said, now includes broad, over-reaching restrictions on local governments that impact the free marketplace.

Making that distinction between the two is an important goal of the commissioners, Howard said.

“We have got to be very careful about making good, solid arguments about what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it,” Howard said. “My concern is that when you try to make these points, you’re getting close to the level of terminology that unnerves people or turns them off.”

Commissioner Richard Rothschild, R-District 4, said the organization advocates a form of environmentalism that intersects environmentalism and socialism. The organization, he said, seeks to inject government into all forms of people’s lives including land use, farming, transportation, home construction and food production.

Doctrine held by the organization states that land should not be viewed as a resource for private property owners, but rather the land needs to be controlled by the government and other stake holders for the greater good, Rothschild said. Since that doctrine is not shared by the board, Rothschild said commissioners believed they should terminate their membership with the organization.

“I care about our environment,” Rothschild said. “But I believe the last great hope to save our environment rests in capitalism and not big government.

“Capitalism breeds the kind of creativity and ingenuity which leads to cost-effective solutions,” he said.

Chief of Staff Steve Powell said the previous board had paid an annual membership fee of between $1,600 and $1,800 to be a part of the ICLEI.

John Modica, a member of the county’s sustainability committee, said it is up to the board to determine how it wants to direct sustainability effort in the county. Being a member of ICLEI, Modica said, doesn’t force the county to follow any particular environmental standards.

“Completely rejecting sustainability all together is completely archaic,” Modica said. “We’re too advanced to not plan for the future.”

Modica said ICLEI offered various tools that the county could use to plan for the future. Terminating that membership, Modica said, will now put the burden of finding those tools onto the county.

The commissioners’ decision to terminate its membership with the organization is one in a series of moves that makes a distinction between environmental stewardship and sustainability, Rothschild said. During the Jan. 12 board meeting, the board also unanimously voted to eliminate the county’s sustainability coordinator positions.

The post had been left vacant since the former Sustainability Coordinator Neil Ridgely took a buyout offered by the outgoing board of commissioners in November. The county’s sustainability committee, Modica said, has been disbanded since Ridgley’s position was eliminated.

UN Agenda 21 -

Coming to a Neighborhood near You

Most Americans are unaware that one of the greatest threats to their freedom may be a United Nations program known as Agenda 21. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development created Agenda 21 as a sustainability agenda which is arguably an amalgamation of socialism and extreme environmentalism brushed with anti-American, anti-capitalist overtones. A detailed history on sustainable development, definitions, and critical actions can be found here. Section III of the Agenda 21 Plan addresses local community sustainable development. The Preamble and Chapter 28 discuss how Agenda 21 should be implemented at a local level. The United Nations purposely recommends avoiding the term Agenda 21 and suggests a cleverly named alternative: “smart growth.” The United Nations Millennium Papers – Issue 2 (page 5) says this of Agenda 21 and smart growth:

Participating in a UN-advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society such as the National Rifle Association, citizen militias and some members of Congress. This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking LA21. So, we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management, or smart growth [emphasis added].

Undoubtedly, residents of any town, county, or city in the United States that treasure their freedom, liberty, and property rights couldn’t care less whether it’s called Agenda 21 or smart growth. A recent example of this can be found in Carroll County, Maryland, where a smart growth plan called Pathways was drafted by the County Planning Department. The plan, if enacted, proposed a breathtaking reshuffling of land rights:

Rezoning of thousands of acres of beautiful, low-density agricultural farmland and protected residential conservation land into office parks

Down-zoning of agriculture land to prevent future subdivision by farmers

Up-zoning of low-density residential land around small towns into higher density zoning to permit construction of hundreds or possibly thousands of inclusive housing units, including apartments and condominiums

Inclusive housing with placement of multi-family construction on in-fill lots within existing residential single family communities

Community leaders working together in Carroll County recently defended their county against overreaching smart growth initiatives. Richard Rothschild, a candidate for Commissioner, emphatically remarks, “Smart growth is not science; it is political dogma combined with an insidious dose of social engineering. Smart growth is a wedding wherein zoning code is married with government-sponsored housing initiatives to accomplish government’s goal of social re-engineering. It urbanizes rural towns with high-density development, and gerrymanders population centers through the use of housing initiatives that enable people with weak patterns of personal financial responsibility to acquire homes in higher-income areas. This has the effect of shifting the voting patterns of rural municipalities from Right to Left.”

Smart growth plans usurp property rights and constitutional rights. Local officials, at the behest of State Government, revise zoning laws to fit into a “smart code” zoning template. A massive reshuffling of property rights ensues. Farmers may lose subdivision rights; conservation land adjacent to population centers may be rezoned into commercial employment centers; and low-density land in small towns is re-designated as growth area and rezoned to accommodate diverse housing including high-density apartments and condominiums.

Finally, a healthy dose of federal- or state-sponsored housing initiatives is embraced to ensure communities are properly balanced. The net effect of these plans is to create highly urbanized population centers throughout otherwise-rural counties, while simultaneously limiting the availability of land for suburban and estate subdivisions, as these are considered an unsustainable waste of land by Agenda 21 disciples.

Clearly, smart growth plans will impact Americans’ future choices in where and how they live. Furthermore, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal and state agencies may attempt to deny grant funds to states and cities that do not adopt smart growth plans.

Most Americans will remain unaware of the implications of smart growth and Agenda 21 until after it is promulgated in their own backyards. Ironically, these plans are more insidious than the Eminent Domain ruling by the Supreme Court in the case of Kelo v City of New London. Under Eminent Domain rulings, property owners usually receive compensation for their losses.

Conversely, smart growth municipal plans, required by statute, enable municipalities to change zoning laws and engage in other regulatory actions that devalue property, restrict off-conveyances, and otherwise erode property values without payment of any compensation to the property owner.

Smart growth has another interesting unintended consequence: it can disrupt conventional alliances and lead to strange political bedfellows. Rural urbanization plans may raise the ire of environmental groups while simultaneously stirring the wrath of both conservative and liberal residents that want to maintain the rural fabric of their communities. Conversely, developers, sensing opportunity, may side with government smart growth bureaucrats in support of these plans.

Regardless of political orientation, two indisputable facts remain. Agenda 21 is a direct assault on private property rights and American sovereignty, and it is coming to a neighborhood near you.

Address by Tom DeWeese, American Policy Center

These are the founding principles of the United States of America. We hear these words. Yet many Americans fail to understand their meaning – or how they effect our everyday lives.

Our founding fathers warned us that eternal vigilance was necessary in order to protect our liberties. They’ve been ignored. And life in America has begun to change.

Americans are finding that life is getting harder. There’s less optimism about the future as the phrase “American dream” seems to have disappeared from our vocabulary. Parents worry about a school system that no longer seems to teach basic academics. Rules and regulations seem to pop out of nowhere to control our daily routines.

The truth is our lives are getting more stressful and everyday living is getting harder because a revolution is taking place in this country and it is stealing the American promise of unalienable rights. These are the rights we were born with. Rights our founding fathers said were government’s duty to protect and preserve.

Those natural rights are now being replaced with “granted rights” created by and authorized by government. As a result, our laws have become little more than rubber bands, stretched to the advantage of the few who have gained the power of pull in the new society of controlled America. You will find this revolution oozing out of every corner of our society. From text books to television to government policy.

It is for implementation of this revolution that your schools have been transformed to produce the citizens to live in the new revolutionary society. It is the root to the drive away from academics and sound science. It is the reason why every classroom is filled with discussions of diversity and multiculturalism. But few academics. It is the reason children are being indoctrinated to turn away from their parents and the values you have taught them.

They are being prepared to live in a different society than ours. They are not being prepared to be American citizens – but of a global village. That’s why they don’t need to know about American history and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers – for they are irrelevant. The education system today is simply an assault on your child’s attitudes, values and beliefs. It is designed to change and mold them. That is public education’s only purpose.

If you fail to grasp this fact – you will never win the battle for liberty. The revolution is anti-property rights. Anti free enterprise. Anti individual liberty. It is anti national sovereignty and national borders. And it is anti Western culture. And it is anti-Christianity.

The goal of the revolution is to transform the world into feudal-like governance by making NATURE the central organizing principle for our economy and society.

This is what the leaders of the revolution believe:

“Nature has an integral set of different values (cultural, spiritual and material) where humans are one strand in nature’s web and all living creatures are considered equal. Therefore the natural way is right and human activities should be molded along nature’s rhythms.”

This quote comes from the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty.

An international agenda has been set in motion, beginning with United Nations’ treaties and agreements, including the Biodiversity Treaty and Agenda 21. That agenda is now working its way down through federal to state to local government policy. The international agenda is driven by the United Nations through two specific UN organizations including, the United Nations Environmental Program and the International Union of Conservation and Nature.

Would it surprise you to learn that six agencies of the United States government are active members of the International Union of Conservation and Nature, including the Departments of State, Interior, Agriculture and the Fish and Wildlife service. And these agencies send representatives to all meetings of the UN Environmental Program. Through all of the treaties, agreements and meetings, there grows an interlocking web of policy that takes root in America through these federal agencies, even driving down into state and local community governments.

The treaties are the roots of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. For Congress to back out of these laws or even to consider reducing some of the regulations that are destroying industry or private property rights would simply be putting the United States in violation of these UN treaties.

And our elected representatives have shown that they lack the strength of character to stand up for American interests over an all-controlling international community.

Agenda 21 is the United Nations blue print for the complete restructuring of nations – and local communities – to fit into a proper mold for global governance. Agenda 21 outlines, in detail, the UN’s vision for a completely managed society, dictating the process to be used for industry, agriculture, housing development, and especially education.

It’s an all-encompassing plan to rule from an all-powerful central government. The common name for the policy is “Sustainable Development.”

Sustainable Development.

If you remember nothing else said here today, remember these two words: Sustainable Development. And remember this: If you profess to love America’s precious liberty then Sustainable Development is your enemy.

So what is Sustainable Development? Imagine an America in which a specific “ruling principle” is created to decide proper societal conduct for every citizen.

That principle would be used to consider everything you eat, what you wear, the kind of homes you live in, the method of transportation used to get to work, the way you dispose of waste, perhaps the number of children you may have, even your education and employment decisions. Sustainable Development is that “ruling principle” for the implementation of what former Vice President Al Gore said we must all suffer through in order to purify our nation from the horrors of the Twentieth Century’s industrial revolution.

In his book, “Earth in the Balance,” Gore called it a “wrenching transformation of society.”

Those are pretty powerful words that should concern anyone who values liberty. It’s a warning that the rules are changing. That a new power elite is taking control. Perhaps you are beginning to notice such changes as you go about your daily routine – but haven’t understood where those changes, and the ideas behind them, are coming from. There are Sustainable Development papers, guidelines and regulations to impose the ruling principle:

On our public education system – to prepare our children to live in a sustainable world.

On our economy – to create partnerships between business and government, making sure business becomes a tool to help implement the policies.

On the environment – leading to controls on private property and business.

On health care – the new drive against obesity is leading directly toward controls on what we eat.

On farming – Sustainable Development policies effect farmers ability to produce more crops by regulating or banning precious chemicals, biotechnology and genetic engineering in the name of environmental protection.

On our mobility – with emphasis on car pools and public transportation and out of our cars and the freedom of personal transportation.

And on public safety – where the rule of law and the court system is being challenged by new regulations that effect the right to privacy and unreasonable search and seizures.

It’s important to understand that these leading issues we face today are not just random concerns that find their way into the forefront of political debate. They are all interconnected to the policies of Sustainable Development.

To quote a special Sustainable Development document prepared by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): “A new ecologically-balanced economics will drive the pursuit of Community Sustainability within modern society’s all encompassing urban-rural industrial civilization….This global marketplace is destined to recast the meanings of industry, work, play, health, agriculture, communications, learning and much more.”

Sustainable Development calls for changing the very infrastructure of the nation, away from private ownership and control of property to nothing short of central planning of the entire economy.

All Sustainable Development policy is built on something called the “precautionary principle,” That means that any activities that might threaten human health or the environment should be stopped – even if no clear cause and effect relationship has been established – and even if the potential threat is largely theoretical. Truly, Sustainable Development is designed to change our way of life.

In our once free society, there are now government debates over the type of car you should be allowed to drive. The kind of foods you may eat. If and where you may build a home or a business.Whole industries are being destroyed through so-called environmental protections. Ranchers, farmers, miners and the timber industry – all teetering on the brink of extinction.

Government agents from the benevolent Park Service to the Forest Service to the Army Corp of Engineers are armed like paramilitary S. W. A.T. teams to take land from Americans who have worked it for generations. In towns and cities across the nation, homeowners suddenly face jail for cutting down trees on their own property. We now call the trees in your back yard the “urban forest.”

And government now values those trees more than the infrastructure of the community. More than the sewers and roads. More than the office buildings which house commerce. More than your home which protects your family. Under these new rules, cutting down a tree diminishes the value of the community. That’s why homeowners are forced to give up major portions of their own property for bike trails and open space for use by people they don’t even know.

If you lately have dealt with government on any level, perhaps you’ve also noticed that there are more layers and more players to deal with. You may have found layers of non-elected regional governments and governing councils enforcing policy. You may have attended such meetings and encountered powerful new voices coming from members of private organizations, now empowered with making and enforcing policy. They’re called NGO’s or non-governmental organizations like the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy or any number of local or affiliated activist groups.

Why do they have such influence over the daily interactions between government and private business? – Because of the “social equity” part of the Sustainable Development package.

They call themselves “stakeholders” and assert that any group that has an interest in, or could be affected by, a corporate decision – or the outcome of a public policy debate – has a right to pressure the decision makers until they give in to their demands.

In other words, they are striving to become a new ruling elite with which you must deal to get anything accomplished.

As Niger Innis, president of the Congress on Racial Equality, points out, the ideological environmental movement is a powerful $4 billion-a year U.S. industry. On the international level its an $8 billion –a –year gorilla. Many of its members are intensely eco-centric, and place much higher value on wildlife and ecological values than on human progress or even human life. They have a deep fear and loathing of big business, technology, chemicals, plastics, fossil fuels and biotechnology. And they insist that the rest of the world should acknowledge and live according to their fears and ideologies.

They are masters at using junk science, scare tactics, intimidation and bogus economic and health claims to gain even greater power. As these policies are implemented, locally-elected officials are actually losing power and decision-making ability in their own communities. Most decisions are now made behind the scenes in non-elected “sustainability councils” armed with truckloads of federal regulations, guidelines and grant money.

In fact, a recent study reported that elected city councils and commissioners have lost approximately 10% of their legislative power during the past 10 years, while, through the consensus process, NGO power has increased by as much as 300%.

It is a wrenching transformation, indeed.

For example, according to Sustainable Development polices, air conditioning, convenience stores, single family housing, and cars are among the products that have already been determined to be unsustainable. Add to that ski runs, grazing of live stock, plowing of fields, logging, dams and reservoirs and power line construction, and you can get the full picture of America under Sustainable Development. Being aware of this root agenda for Sustainable Development will help you better understand actions by the government and those mysterious private organizations often found sitting with them at the table. Their decisions directly effect your life.

Sustainable Development is the official policy of the federal government. It is now the official policy of every state and almost every city and small burg and town in the nation.

I’m sure you’ve seen news reports of the destruction of dams across the country. Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt personally took a sledgehammer to one in New Hampshire. The feel-good sound bite at these dam destructions is that they are freeing the rivers for the fish. But on the Penobscot River in Maine, a local power company was just paid $25 million by the Atlantic Salmon Federation to tear down two dams. What they aren’t telling the local residents is that this action is about to cost them 10% of their electrical power. The other thing they aren’t telling the tax payers is that much of the $25 million will come from federal and state grants set aside for Sustainable Development programs.

If you’ve tried to buy a new house lately, you may be aware of new policies over housing development in which lots are postage stamp sized and placed close to light rail train lines. This is Sustainable Development policy in action. Roads have been narrowed in some communities, making it more difficult to travel by car. In the state of Maryland, not a single new road was on the books as highways backed up with massive traffic jams, under Sustainable Development polices implemented by former governor Parris Glendening.

All of these policies stem from the revolution called Sustainable Development.

Ignore Sustainable Development at the peril of everything you hold dear – individual liberty, private property, free enterprise, free travel, free association – even life itself. Driving the implementation of Sustainable Development in the United States are two separate action plans. The first is the Wildlands Project.

The Wildlands Project is the most radical, outrageous idea ever conceived by grown men and women.

The Wildlands Project calls for the “rewilding” of 50 % of all of the land in every state – restoring everything back to the way it was before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on the continent. In other words, the elimination of human presence on over 50% of the American landscape. It was conceived in the minds of eco-thugs like Dave Foreman, the maniac who founded Earth First.

In the Wildlands Project documents, Foreman said, “we live to see the day when Grizzlies in Mexico have an unbroken connection to Grizzlies in Alaska; when Gray wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals…”

In such a vision, there is little room for people.

Earth First went on to say: “Does all of this mean that …the Wildlands Project advocates the end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly.” Followers of Foreman’s ideas now burn down housing construction sites; destroy heavy equipment owned by timber companies; and set fire to Hummer dealerships. Reed Noss, one of the authors of the Wildlands Project, and later a policy expert in the Clinton Department of Interior, said, “The native ecosystems and the collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

The project became a threat to you and me when the Wildlands Project’s blue print was included in the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty, and was ratified at the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit. In other words, the Wildlands Project quickly grew from ravings of lunatics to international policy. That wasn’t an accident.

The eco-thugs have a direct link to the UN as recognized Non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). They actually help write the policies.

Much of the Biodiversity Treaty was implemented by the Clinton Administration through executive order– even though it was never officially ratified by the Senate. It’s now official U.S. government policy and the Bush Administration has done nothing to roll back or reduce its threat.

The second path of implementing Sustainable Development is Smart Growth. This is the plan to herd us all into specific human habitat areas – out of the suburbs and our beautiful yards and into crowded cities and high rises. The entire scheme was introduced at the 1996 UN Habitat II Summit in Istanbul. That plan called for the down-sizing of cities and towns into new “urban clusters” where workplaces, housing and nature are blended together.

Homes and communities, set up in specific human habitat areas will be crowded, multi-family, low rise residential areas with running and walking paths instead of cars. Transportation will be primarily light rail trains and bicycles. As one Smart Growth activist gleefully said: “It will be the humans in cages with the animals looking in.”

Under the Sustainable Development banner, the battle to diminish the liberty that our Founding Fathers envisioned is accelerating.

For 200 years we have prospered because we have operated under a rule of law that was designed to protect the individual’s right to pursue his own life in the way he chooses. To work, to play, to invest – and to own property – and use it in the way that best suits his needs. The government, by edict of our Constitution, has the responsibility to protect such activities. In this nation, from the very beginning, private ownership of the land was undertaken as a right of the people. Government’s job was to make sure that no one could unjustly take that land; or control how it was used; or trespass over it against the owner’s will.

Such a form of government is not a democracy!

Democracy, the idea that the majority rules, can be a lynch mob crying for action against an individual it has deemed guilty. If the law says we must first try him – the lynch mob cries – “we can’t wait for the slow wheels of justice to turn – somebody must do something – now!!”

Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. And Democracy is the word most often used to describe the implementation of Sustainable Development.

Our way of government is a Republic.

In a Republic, even if the majority dislikes how a property owner uses his land, the government protects his right to do so, so long as it is not infringing on that same right of others.

This is a guarantee to Americans that they are safe and free to pursue their own lives without interference of government. In fact, it says the government’s job is to protect those liberties so that they can pursue their lives.

And that guarantee is only possible in a Republic.

Such visions of freedom have become our legacy. Today, as we are attacked by running-dog terrorists, the nation rallies around the mantra of freedom. Flags fly from our homes and car antennas. Bumper stickers declare “God Bless America.” Banners shout “Let Freedom Ring.”

But in fact, under the banner of diversity, community and earth, our American liberty is being replace with rights granted by a gang of anti-freedom hooligans hiding out in the United Nations and buried in government bureaucracies and non-governmental private organizations.

John Adams said, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God – and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it – anarchy and tyranny commence.”

Is that not what we have done? Do we want leaders who stand for the rule of law? Or do we select candidates based on what kind of goodies they promise to dish out? The truth is we keep electing politicians who offer the best argument on how to use that government power. We select our leaders today based on which ones have the best plan for collecting taxes; the best plan for restricting land use; the best plan for providing government-restricted medical care and drug prescriptions… and soon, if some get their way, the best plan to control what we eat – obesity, you see, is a new Sustainable mantra. In every case, by electing these people, we are licensing the government to infringe on someone else’s property rights.

As a result, Americans are now beginning to wake up to find the real 800 pound gorilla (Sustainable Development) living on their property.

Now most people immediately equate Sustainable Development with environmental policy. And that is the reason most often given for its implementation. Land use control is the heart of Sustainable Development policy. – But accepting the perception that Sustainable Development is simply good environmental stewardship is a serious mistake.

The logo used in Sustainable Development literature depicts three concentric circles, each labeled with a defining category of the ruling principle. One is labeled “social equity,” another, “economic prosperity,” and the third, “ecological integrity.” They sound innocent enough. But these three categories encompass every aspect of human life. To achieve the goals behind these three very basic items would demand unlimited government authority to control business decisions; eliminate private property and personal achievement, and create a completely managed society under top-down bureaucratic control.

Social equity and social justice require that the earth’s wealth be shared between those who produce and those who don’t. It’s every welfare program and wealth redistribution scheme ever proposed. This is not free choice by free individuals. Under Sustainable Development, business is little more than a tool of the social-planning managers. Partnerships between business and government decide what kinds of products are to be produced, who will produce them – and how they will be produced.

All must be done in accordance with environmentally correct procedures – government regulations.

Taxes to force compliance will ensure proper business conduct. This is not free enterprise.

Ecological Integrity: Well, that’s just the excuse for the social planners to pull you and me in and enforce their timeless schemes for power.

Under Sustainable Development – true environmental protection is just for the suckers. Power and wealth redistribution is the real game being played here.

In the name of protecting the environment; in the name of social equity and justice; in the name of safety and prosperity; Sustainable Development has become official policy in the federal government, state government and every large city and small burg in America. Those behind it are powerful, well funded, well placed and well organized. No matter how crazy the plan, they are succeeding in building support from the American people.

Here’s how.

Your community is now a sustainable community.

Have you heard your officials talking about how to curtail growth and block development? Are they talking about historic preservation? Is your downtown now called a historic district? Are they talking about how to control business development? Has the subject of public transportation come up? Is it getting more difficult to enjoy driving your car around town?

Here is the definition of a sustainable community from the Report of the President’s Council:

“Sustainable Communities encourage people to work together to create healthy communities where natural resources and historic resources are preserved, jobs are available, sprawl is contained, neighborhoods are secure, education is lifelong, transportation and health care are accessible, and all citizens have opportunities to improve the quality of their lives.”

Now break it down. How do you actually achieve these goals? Again, see if some of these things sound familiar. How do the people work together? We need some sort of committee or council to join. One that will set a vision for the city.

We need all of the leaders, from elected officials to educators, to

business leaders, to the local chamber of commerce to the local

news media. They will put a plan together for the future

development of the community.

(By the way, that plan isn’t really written by the committee. The blue print will come out of Washington, backed with federal grants for those who comply).

Now, to see that the committee can really achieve its goals, it needs to have some teeth. We need a partnership between the committee and government. A plan will be drawn up and it will be the legislation guideline for laws and regulations.

We must understand that individual land owners and businessmen can’t be trusted to share the vision on their own

So the Committee must control the use of all private property.

It must decide what is historic and must be preserved. It must set boundaries beyond which no new homes may be built. It must decide how the community should look. Where open space should be. Where business can be allowed to operate.

Farmers must be stopped from selling their land to developers – even if our economic policies make it impossible to earn a living on the farm. We’ll just take taxpayer dollars and give it to the farmers to buy out their development rights, commonly known as PDR’s. That way the land will forever be controlled by the government.

Cars are a very nasty habit. We must teach our community that everyone should be more open to public transportation. We must build light rail trains and bus lines to get us around to our jobs. And to make it convenient for everyone, we’ll design housing developments around the rail and bus lines so they are within walking distance for everyone.

We’ll surround the community with bike paths and high density real estate policies that restrict development. We’ll narrow streets and refrain from building unnecessary roads to discourage use of cars. In fact, eventually, our plan calls for eliminating cars from the community and that will relieve over-crowded streets. Cars will be banned.

Our homes can be designed in high and low-rise buildings with office space on top floors and stores on the main floor, with our apartments sandwiched in between. We’ll never have to leave the building during our daily routine. So we don’t need yards that have to be mowed with smelly, gas-guzzling, air-polluting, noise-polluting mowers.

Of course with our low and high rise public housing, single family homes that waste precious land won’t be necessary. Suburban housing will be banned. We’ll strictly control the use and development of utilities like power – and natural resources like water. We must force our citizens to severely restrict their own water use. Ten gallons a day, per person, seems about right.

We won’t accept businesses which lack the proper environmental attitudes. They will either comply or be banned from operating in our town. If we don’t have enough jobs, we’ll tax the businesses to raise the necessary funds to help those who don’t have one. Social equity is key to our committee’s plan.

But we must do more. The vision can’t become reality unless the people in the

community must have the proper respect for the plan.

One place to start is in the schools. Here are our future generations. It’s not as important that they can read and write and perform math problems as it is to understand the importance of living together with your neighbors in a happy, prosperous, safe, well organized community.

So let’s add some classes to help them obtain the proper outlook for the future.

Teach them that they must work together rather than selfishly setting personal goals.

Help them understand that personal wants and dreams and ambitions are selfish and will only hurt everyone’s future.

How best to teach them these things? Let’s form a partnership with businesses to help the children learn about work, right there in the school.

In fact, we can even let the children take half of each school day to go to the job as a volunteer. To make sure that everyone participates, we’ll make it part of their grade.

And to make sure that they always keep the valuable lessons and don’t stray from the special teachings they learned in the school to work partnership, let’s keep their education going for life.

For the adults, there can be public visioning classes for them, too. After all, we can’t fully organize the community around our grand idea if there is resistance from some of the people.

So, again, with our business partnerships, and with the help of the Chamber of Commerce, and the schools, we’ll work with the folks on a neighborhood basis.

There are other things that the committee will find necessary to ban – in order to assure that the citizens have the opportunity to improve their lives.

Obesity is a national epidemic. We must also control what people eat. Our plan will make sure that they eat properly.

That’s why we can’t allow precious farm land in our county to be wasted on raising cattle for beef consumption. Beef is harmful to your health, so it will be banned. Wheat and soy will be grown on that land instead.

Ever had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner of tofurkey? With our new healthy diet, as outlined by the committee, we will no longer need things like 7-11’s and McDonalds and their unhealthy fast foods and snacks. They will be banned.

There is one more danger to the happiness and security of our community that must be addressed – overpopulation. The committee will decide the proper number of folks who can comfortably live in our community limits. If we don’t control the population, we will be overrun. Some strict guidelines must be imposed, for the sake of the community’s well being and for the protection of our environment. Birth control education and supplies will be a major part of the process for keeping the population down. But if our folks don’t heed the committee’s warnings, if the population begins to exceed our limits, drastic action will be required.

Limits on the number of children a family may have will have to be imposed. Those conceiving children against those limits will have to pay a high price. Fines, of course. Imprisonment for exceptional cases. Now, what to do about those yet unborn, but illegal babies…? Action must be taken, for the sake of all of us in the community.

Do you understand where we are headed, my friends?

Name the issue – name the aspect of your life that is not affected by such a mentality. All of this, and much more is the future under Sustainable Development. This is not about “preserving the environment for future generations.” It’s indeed a wrenching transformation of America – away from a nation of well protected liberties – to one of all-controlling regulations. Across the nation Americans are now facing an assault on their liberties as never before experienced in the land of the free.

On the New River in West Virginia, 100 families suddenly found they were going to lose their homes to the National Park Service. Why, because the Park Service had acquired control over their property years ago when the New River had been designated a National Heritage River.No homes. No people. You see, their homes were in the view shed of the new parkway. Some tourist might like to take pictures of the scenic view and their homes were in the way.

That’s the only excuse needed.

When one elderly family asked a park ranger why they were taking the home they had lived in all of their lives – he answered – “because we can.”

In Columbia, South Carolina, The Richland County Council passed a Town and Country Land Use Vision Plan that will restrict forever the use of land by private property owners.

Kay McClanahan, a property owner and courageous fighter for her rights has organized her neighbors to fight the plan. For her trouble, she and her husband were bodily thrown out of a Council meeting, even after being recognized by the chairman to speak.

In Klamath Falls, Oregon, more than 100 farmers have been threatened with extinction after environmentalists got a court order to turn off their water to support a sucker fish.

Now, the folks who worked their private land and turned it into a thriving oasis, are dying of thirst – their farms turned into wasteland. As they suffer the loss of their American dream, power thirsty environmentalists move in to buy up their land and declare them willing sellers.

In Falmouth, Maine, Mary Alice Davis seeks to develop a few acres of her 187 acre estate with million dollar homes. But she has been blocked by a community elite who refuse to allow her to use her property for any purpose other than her home that already exists.

Again, she is told that her property is someone else’s view shed and their sunsets take precedent over her economic desires. Such restrictions – imposed on no one else in town – have basically rendered her land worthless because no one will buy it with such controls.

This is how Sustainable Development is affecting millions of Americans and their private property, their hopes and their dreams.

Remember, to rewild 50% of all the land in every state, as called for in the Wildlands Project, Americans have to lose a lot of private land. These are just a very few of the victims. The rest of us are next.

But what about the courts, you may ask? We have laws in this country.

Keep in mind those who tell you that the United Nations has no control over our nation – that it is no threat to our sovereignty.

Then listen to these words from Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer: “Through commerce, through globalization, through the spread of democratic institutions, through immigration to America, it’s becoming more and more one world of many different kinds of people. And how they’re going to live together across the world will be the challenge, and whether our Constitution and how it fits into the governing documents of other nations, I think, will be a challenge for the next generations.”

So much for the rule of American law. Sustainable Development is now official policy of the Supreme Court of the United States, too.

There has never been a single vote in Congress to create Sustainable Development. It’s all

done through cleverly rearranged wording of existing programs and budgets, using UN

treaties as guidelines. It’s all under the radar.

Former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told a meeting of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development that his agency could implement at least 67% of the Sustainable Development agenda with no new legislation.

That’s how it’s done. And that’s why you’ve never heard a debate on such a radical

transformation of our nation. Sustainable Development is the greatest threat ever

perpetrated against American liberty.

There can be no hope of living in a nation of limited government with Sustainable Development as official government policy. The two are diametrically opposed. Americans would never concede their liberty to Swastikas or Hammers and Sickles. But tuck it in a green blanket for environmental protection and we’ll toss it all on the fire like a good old fashioned book burning.

This is about totalitarianism. It’s about controlling every aspect of our lives with decisions made by committees that will grow more powerful and more oppressive with each passing day and each new regulation proposed by newly empowered special interests groups.

There will be no satisfying their lust for power. There will be no part of our lives that is overlooked or uncontrolled. Our homes, our food, our babies, our liberty. To defeat it we must understand that it is free men operating in free markets, untethered by government regulation that allows us to find solutions to hunger, decent housing, superior medical care, education; overcrowded highways and human happiness.

We must understand that it is only bad government that causes poverty, overpopulation and

environmental damage. Totalitarianism, socialism, fascism and almost every other ism are

the root of suffering on earth. The logo of Sustainable Development, with it’s three

concentric circles, should be viewed by all who love liberty as the new swastika of our era.

There is no greater threat to our way of life.

Sustainable Development is anti-science.

It is anti-knowledge.

It is anti-human.

It is anti-reason.

It is the creed of the mindless savage who seeks brute force over reasonable thought.

And if we don’t learn of its evil now,

If we don’t heed the warning…

If we don’t rip it out of every level of government policy by its well-entrenched roots…

Then American life, indeed human existence, as we know it, will enter a new dark ages of pain and misery unlike any ever experienced by the community of man.

But it’s an agenda that ultimately doesn’t work. Because government control of individuals is a bankrupt scheme, proven a failure time and time again throughout history.

And that’s why it can be stopped.

The key to victory is to first understand your enemy. Know where he is headed and you can cut him off at every turn.

Let me give you one suggestion that you, as a political party, can do to stop Sustainable Development.

Don’t waste your time sitting in meetings, trying to compromise or discuss. Don’t allow yourselves to be manipulated by their consensus meetings. Don’t bother with Congress to solve the situation. Instead set your sites on the ballot boxes in your local communities. There are approximately 3300 counties in this nation. Those counties are the closest level of government to each of you. And by the Constitution, still the most powerful level of government – if you handle it right.

Begin now to elect county commissioners and city council members.

Make sure that they understand Sustainable Development. Then make sure they have the courage to stand up against the pressure from green groups. If they say no to the federal grants that are the Trojan Horses for implementing and enforcing Sustainablism in the local communities, then we can stop it – community by community.

There will be little the Sustainablists can do short of sending in federal troops.

We are engaged in a battle for the American dream our founding fathers worked so hard to guarantee. I feel they are watching us now. They knew one truth that we must all relearn very quickly.

The only way to make sure that government doesn’t abuse its power is to not grant it in

the first place.

Sustainable Development must be stopped.

Arm yourselves first with that knowledge and then step by step – take your community

– and then – take America back.

UPDATE, 2012: Congressman Griffith is in serious default! Griffith has ignored invitations to hear property rights experts Don Casey and Tom DeWeese, while sucking up to The Crooked Road Organization to put all of District 9 under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service: Along with Senator Mark Warner (a Progressive/Marxist with a voting record to prove it) Griffith is co-sponsoring the designation of Congressional District 9 as a National Heritage Area.

There are 49 such areas in the US and demonstrated, documented evidence of property rights abuses. Not only that—but your local Board of Supervisors is totally circumvented in this designation. That means YOU, the voter, are completely left out of the process. WHERE IS THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED, without even knowledge that the abuse is taking place?

Congressman Griffith is now in serious default of the following pledge. He has not bothered to acknowledge invitations to presentations by property rights experts Don Casey and Tom DeWeese, while sending representatives to the HOAX that The Crooked Road organization is masquerading as “public outreach”. (There were 12 public meetings. A total of 30 people was the largest group in attendance. No information was available about how this will affect land use and zoning in ALL 19 counties in District 9—-by “The Crooked Road” Management group that will work with the National Park Service in making these decisions. YES! That’s right! It won’t be YOUR ELECTED BOARD: They are well on their way to becoming totally irrelevant. IN FACT, THEY HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY UNAWARE OF THIS DESIGNATION PROPOSAL, until our efforts to alert them!!!)

On Thursday, October 14th, 2010, Tea Party Patriot from Abingdon/Bristol, Wytheville, Galax/Fancy Gap, Wise County, Pulaski/Dublin and Jeffersonville District groups pledged to support Morgan Griffith as their 9th District candidate for Congress in acceptance of his vow…

1. To diligently work to cut the size of government.

2. To uphold the 10th Amendment, state’s rights and sovereignty.

3. To defund and repeal the Health Care Bill.

4. To promise fiscal conservatism as it applies to Article 1 Section 8 of the

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